DGPH Seminar - Guillaume Fontaine: Applying and Advancing Implementation Science for Population Health: Insights from Efforts to Improve Hepatitis C Care Access in Australia and Canada

Join us for the first seminar of the Department of Global and Public Health's Fall 2025 series with Professor Guillaume Fontaine, who will deliver a talk titled "Applying and Advancing Implementation Science for Population Health: Insights from Efforts to Improve Hepatitis C Care Access in Australia and Canada". 

• WHEN: Tuesday, September 30, 2025, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.
• WHERE: Hybrid | 2001 Avenue McGill College, Room 1140 and online

Abstract:

This talk will explore how implementation science frameworks and methods can be applied to advance health equity and improve access to hepatitis C care across diverse populations and settings in Australia and Canada. Lessons will be shared from studies addressing barriers and facilitators to hepatitis C testing and treatment among people who inject drugs, individuals with experience in the prison system, people experiencing homelessness, and primary care populations. Examples will include key implementation science studies embedded in the Australian National Hepatitis C Point-of-Care Testing Program, one of the first global efforts to scale up decentralized hepatitis C testing and treatment across prisons, community clinics, mobile outreach services, and Aboriginal health organizations (>100 sites, >45,000 individuals tested), and Canadian initiatives using programmatic implementation research, process mapping, and stakeholder co-design to develop tailored implementation strategies for scaling point-of-care testing nationally.

Speaker Bio: 

Dr. Guillaume Fontaine (PhD, MSc, RN) is an Assistant Professor of Implementation Science at McGill University’s Ingram School of Nursing, Director of the McGill RISE³ Implementation Science Lab, FRQ-S Junior 1 Research Scholar, and Principal Investigator at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology, Lady Davis Institute. Additionally, he holds visiting appointments in the Viral Hepatitis Clinical Research Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, and the Centre for Implementation Research, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. He co-leads the Implementation Science Pillar for the CIHR/PHAC Canadian Network on Hepatitis C (CanHepC), Co-Lead of the Methods Think Tank for the CIHR Pan-Canadian HIV/AIDS and STBBIs Clinical Trials Research Network (CTN+) and sits on the Steering Committee of Knowledge Translation Canada. Dr. Fontaine has authored over 95 publications, secured more than $37M in research funding, and delivered over 30 invited talks and workshops across Canada, the United States, and Australia. His research program focuses on applying and advancing implementation science frameworks and methodologies to improve healthcare outcomes, with a focus on infectious diseases.