Congratulations Maxwell J. Smith on receiving a 2016 Banting Fellowship!
The Government of Canada has announced 70 new Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship recipients. The Banting fellows exemplify world-class research capacity at an internationally competitive level of funding. These awards are Canada’s most prestigious awards for doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows.
The Banting program is funded through the three federal research granting agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
It is with great pride that we congratulate the recipient of this year's Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship: Maxwell J. Smith
Given the well-established impact of social factors (e.g., education, working conditions) on health, promoting population health demands extensive knowledge of the interactions between health and social policy. Central to efforts exploring this relationship is a recognition that disparities in social conditions can create disparities in health between population groups. When health disparities are caused by conditions that are perceived to be unjust, they are referred to as health inequities and are considered of ethical importance for governments to remediate. Despite concerted efforts to reduce health inequities in Canada, health inequities persist and are growing among certain populations. Two of the central barriers to advancing health equity in Canada have been identified as mobilizing action across non-health sectors and collaborating intersectorally. Significant attention has therefore been devoted to studying and developing intersectoral strategies for health equity; however, these strategies have hitherto neglected an examination of the role that ethical values play in constraining or promoting action on health equity in non-health sectors, despite the fact that ‘health equity’ is an inherently ethical concept. This is a crucial gap, as the values and aims undergirding public health’s pursuit of health equity may be at odds with social policies in other government sectors, which may consider the reduction of health inequities to be peripheral to, if not incompatible with, their own values and objectives. This research is a novel attempt to fill this gap by engaging stakeholders in both public health and a domain occupying a key system intervention point in the social determinants of health—education—in order to identify areas where sectoral values related to health equity cohere and conflict, with the ultimate goal of producing empirically grounded, ethically robust recommendations for the pursuit of health equity in social policy domains outside the health sector.