Current Research Projects

Principal Investigator: Arijit Nandi

Website: www.machequity.com (includes complete list of co-investigators)

Funding: Canadian Institutes of Health Research

For over a century evidence has accumulated that demonstrates the dramatic impact that poverty, economic and gender inequality have on health and health equity. Compared with the magnitude of evidence of the problems created, though, far less is known about what to do about it. The Maternal and Child Health Equity (MACHEquity) project is rigorously examining the effects on population health of differing social policy approaches taken around the world to address poverty, economic and gender inequity. In carrying out this work, researchers from McGill University, including the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, are collaborating with investigators in the United States, Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia to focus on substantive areas that have been set as priorities by all 192 UN member states through the Millennium Development Goals: infant (under one year old) and child mortality (under 5 years old), maternal mortality, and HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

MACHEquity is comprised of three components:

1. Research. The research program examines how policies aimed at reducing poverty and gender inequality impact (i) major causes of illness and death in infants and children, (ii) major causes of illness and death in women under 50, and (iii) HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other major diseases.

2. Training. The doctoral and post-doctoral training opportunities provided by MACHEquity aim to develop an international cohort of scholars with the methodological capacities to estimate the effects of social policies on health.

3. Knowledge mobilization. As a clearer understanding of what works is not enough to improve health and health equity, a critical element of MACHEquity is translating research findings into practical policy change through partnerships with Canadian and international NGOs.

Principal Investigator: Kristin Voigt

Co-investigators: Sam Harper, Nicholas King, Meredith Young

Funding: CIHR

Addressing problems of global health requires the appropriate allocation of highly scarce resources. Decisions about how available funds should be spent must be sensitive to a variety of pressing health needs while also meeting considerations of fairness and legitimacy. Global health measures are an important instrument in such decisions since they can provide an assessment of the state of global health and allow us to quantify the health impact of different interventions and policy approaches. However, one of the most prominent measures of population health – the disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) developed as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study – has been hugely controversial. Partly in response to the objections leveled against it, the measure has recently undergone its first major methodological revision since its inception in the 1990s. This project seeks to evaluate, from an inter-disciplinary perspective, the suitability of the revised methodology on which the GBD health measure is based for its intended and actual use in policy decisions.

Early publications from the Project

Kristin Voigt. ‘Measuring global health’. In Patti Tamara Lenard and Christine Straehle (eds.), Global Justice and Health Inequalities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 139-156.

Principal Investigator: Christopher Barrington-Leigh

Funding: FQRSC, SSHRC, other

Through several related research efforts in the "economics of happiness" we are investigating the variation in life satisfaction across individuals, communities, and countries. This work makes use of existing international and Canadian surveys, as well as our own evolving survey instrument. There are opportunities for economists (and allied disciplines) at all levels from undergraduate to post-doctoral. One strand of this work relates in particular to the remarkable changes in subjective well-being of Quebeckers over the last quarter century.

Early publications from the Project

"The Québec convergence and Canadian life satisfaction 1985--2008," Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques, March 2013.

Website

Principal Investigator: Frank Elgar

Funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

New research on school bullying and physical fighting among children and adolescents indicates that income inequality begins to contribute to violent behaviour early in the lifespan. The developmental pathways that underlie this relationship are unclear. In this project, we are devloping a developmental model and research tools for studying the contributions of income inequality to youth violence. It involves the analyses of data from several international sources, including the WHO Health Behaviours in School-aged Children study.

Early publications from the Project

Elgar FJ, Pickett KE, Pickett W, Craig W, Molcho M, Hurrelmann K, Lenzi M. School bullying, homicide and income inequality: a cross-national pooled time series analysis. Int J Public Health, in press.

Elgar FJ, Aitken N. Income inequality, trust and homicide in 33 countries. Eur J Public Health. 2011 Apr;21(2):241-6.

Elgar FJ, Craig W, Boyce W, Morgan A, Vella-Zarb R. Income inequality and school bullying: multilevel study of adolescents in 37 countries. J Adolesc Health. 2009 Oct;45(4):351-9.

frank [dot] elgar [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Email)
Website
Phone: 514-398-1739
Office: Charles Meredith House, Room 302

Principal Investigator:  David Wright

This research project examines the transnational history of physician migration in the second half of the twentieth century. It will analyze the complex patterns of migration of physicians between national jurisdictions, which were neither unidirectional, nor can be characterized as a 'medicial carousel'. Rather, there emerged patterns of migration that were structured by cultural ties of the Commonwealth (and for French-speaking physicians, La Francophonie), the tradition of postgraduate medical training in Britain, and the modernization of immigration laws in receiving countries.

This project lies at the intersection of history of medicine, history of health policy, and immigration history with the following three objectives:

1. To examine the extent and nature of the immigration of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) to Canada in the post WWII era
2. To analyze the impact of the migration of physicians on source countries and their public health infrastructures
3. To explore the role of foreign-trained doctors in the evolution of public policy.

Early Publications from the Project

Wright, D., Clarke, J., “Too Many Doctors: Closing the Door to IMGs in Canada, c. 1976-1991”, Canadian Bulletin for Medical History, in production (March, 2013).

Wright, D., Mullally, S., Cordukes, C., “ ‘Worse than Being Married’: The Exodus of British Doctors from the National Health Service to Canada, c. 1955-1975”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, (2010), doi: 10.1093/jhmas/jrq013.

D Wright, N Flis and M Gupta, The 'Brain Drain' of Physicians: Historical antecedents to an ethical debate, c. 1960-79, Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 3:24 (10 Nov 2008) http://www.peh-med.com/content/3/1/24

Mullally, S., Wright, D., “La Grande Séduction?: The Immigration of Foreign-Trained Physicians to Canada, c.1954-76’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol 31 (2007), 1-22.

david [dot] j [dot] wright [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Email)
Website
Phone: 514-398-1292
Office: Charles Meredith House, Room 100

Principal Investigators: Daniel Weinstock and Nicholas B. King