Joint Centre for Bioethics

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Groundbreakers

Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation

COVID-19 is the ninth pandemic, or large-scale epidemic, the world has experienced in the past century – and it won’t be the last.

To help the public and policymakers better navigate the next global outbreak, the ��ɫֱ�� has created the Institute for Pandemics (IFP) based at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

The institute is dedicated to preventing, preparing for, fighting and recovering from pandemics – with a public health focus. It’s built around three strategic pillars: readiness, recovery and resilience.

Nelson Lee

“We want to recover from this current public health crisis – it’s not over yet,” says Nelson Lee, interim director of the Institute for Pandemics and a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health who is an expert on emerging infectious diseases, pandemics and epidemics. “But we also want to get ready for the next one in order to make better responses and decisions.

“The Institute for Pandemics will take an interdisciplinary approach to better understand transmission, how it's affecting our society and the economy, and how to make better public health decisions by pooling together researchers from social sciences, public health, medicine and pharmacy to engineering, and health economists, computer data scientists and more.”

The IFP is the vision of professor Adalsteinn Brown, dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and co-founder of the Institute. The research areas of the IFP are led by David Fisman, a professor in the school’s epidemiology division; associate professor Jennifer Gibson, director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics, and Geoffrey Anderson, a professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation.

Fisman will lead the Centre for Pandemic Readiness, which is dedicated to research to prevent the next pandemic and limit transmission. Gibson will helm the Centre for Pandemic Resilience, which aims to build equitable health systems that are safeguarded by data-driven, innovative technologies. Anderson will lead the Centre for Pandemic Recovery, which will provide evidence-based understandings of the broader negative socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 to guide better, fairer policies.

A ��ɫֱ�� Institutional Strategic Initiative, the IFP will connect researchers across academic disciplines to find accurate, sustainable, and reflective solutions to the multi-layered challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has brought. It will also act as a trusted voice to sort through the information – and misinformation – about how to move ahead.

The inequities exposed by the pandemic were ‘striking’

Arjumand Siddiqi

Arjumand Siddiqi is a professor and division head of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. As a social epidemiologist, Siddiqi studies the impact of economic and social factors – including race and ethnicity – that cause unequal health outcomes.

Siddiqi’s work focuses on Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. She is particularly interested in how wealthy countries use and share their wealth, including the ripple effects of social policy decisions and how the legacies of white-settler colonialism affect diverse societies.

While COVID-19 is an airborne disease that puts everyone at risk, Siddiqi’s work shows that socioeconomic factors make some communities much more vulnerable than others. This includes people who lack the ability to work from home, live in crowded conditions or share a space with an essential service worker.

Social epidemiologists trace the patterns of disparities in a health crisis, including the social determinants of health. Compared to previous outbreaks like SARS, Siddiqi describes COVID-19’s impact on vulnerable communities as striking – yet predictable.

“Your social position is a powerful source in dictating what your life is like and whether you have the resources and autonomy to stay healthy or whether you will be made by society to be vulnerable,” says Siddiqi, a Canada Research Chair in Population Health Equity.

“Those consequences of not having resources or autonomy lead to health [issues] in a lot of different ways – and this time around, it led to increased exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

At a July 2020 Standing Committee on Health session in Canada’s House of Commons, Siddiqi outlined how some neighbourhoods in Toronto were more affected than others by the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, Black neighbourhoods were 40 times more likely to be at risk of contracting COVID-19 than white, upper-class neighbourhoods, she said.

At the time, an interactive map of COVID-19 rates per neighbourhood released by Toronto Public Health reported that the city’s northwest neighbourhoods – home to predominantly working-class Black communities – saw COVID-19 infection rates of 450 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, neighbourhoods located in central Toronto – and home to higher-income, white residents – had approximately 15 cases per 100,000 people.

How do we move forward to build resilient communities? Siddiqi says that, from an institutional perspective, providing information and access to health care is essential – but ensuring they have the economic power to thrive is crucial.

How did lockdown measures affect our mental health?

From children attending classes on Zoom to the blurring of parents’ work and home lives, COVID-19 lockdown measures had a far-reaching impact on our sense of community and well-being.

John Sina Moin

John Sina Moin, a post-doctoral researcher at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is exploring the mental health outcomes that COVID-19 measures had on vulnerable populations – primarily mothers, children and youth.

The international study, set for release early next year, compares the socioeconomic challenges and health disparities faced by mothers with young children and young adults living in Toronto and London, England since the pandemic. The study will concentrate on four age-based cohorts: mothers with children who are one to five years old; mothers with children who are six to 12 years old; youth who are 13 to 17 years of age and young adults between the ages of 18 to 24.

“When it comes to children and youth, remote learning largely disrupted their social routine,” Moin says. “Mothers carried a heavier burden of taking care of children while balancing work and single-parent families had even more socioeconomic pressures.

“We think that this had a detrimental impact on their mental health.”

Moin’s research shows that mothers of one to five-year-old and mothers with children who are six to 12 years old experienced more strains on their mental health. Moin says that for the latter cohort, this may be due to increased demands to help children with schooling, which was not a factor for mothers with younger kids. As for challenges faced by mothers with babies, he notes that stressors may include social distancing and not being able to get the same level of support from friends and family before the pandemic started. This cohort may also experience anxiety about the future of their children and the rising cost of living.

Meanwhile, a September 2021 report released by the Survey on COVID-19 and Mental Health (SCMH), found that one in four Canadians who were 18 or older screened positive for symptoms of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That was up from one in five from the previous year.

In Moin’s study, too, teenagers and young adults experienced increased mental health support needs.

While the shift to remote learning was one of the largest hurdles for all youth cohorts, those between the ages of 18 to 24 lost many rites of passage into adulthood – including experiencing campus life or living on their own for the first time. They also had difficulty landing part-time jobs to supplement their incomes.

Moin is continuing to process the data collected in both Toronto and London and will further explore the mental health experiences and impacts on families based on income and other factors such as deprivation score.

Leveraging technology for accessible, quality care

Virtual doctor visits remain a safe and accessible way to access health care as we recover from the pandemic – and Moin says the practice may be one of the pandemic’s silver linings.

That’s because virtual care makes it easier for people with physical disabilities or who live in remote areas to access a doctor – and doesn’t necessarily require sophisticated technology. Moin, for example, led a study on accessing type 2 diabetes care during the pandemic that found, among other things, that 90 per cent of virtual care was delivered by telephone in Ontario.

Even so, Moin says the province is lagging in its efforts to capitalize on virtual care, including investing in apps or remote technologies to measure blood-sugar levels or high blood pressure, for example.

Moin says it’s critical to learn from our collective experience with COVID-19 – including fully embracing innovative, virtual health-care services that are more accessible and don’t sacrifice patient care – so we’re better prepared for future health threats.

Moin says we must also take the time and effort to understand where we can best leverage technology and where traditional means of delivering care are still most effective. That way, we can improve care for patients by taking advantage of the best means of health care available. This will leave us better prepared for future health threats.

“We need to learn from history and everything that has happened with this pandemic,” he says. “Part of this is being resilient to stop shocks to the system, like future pandemics or other global events.

“There are many lessons to be learned to help us in the future.”

This article is part of a multimedia series about ��ɫֱ��'s Institutional Strategic Initiatives program – which seeks to make life-changing advancements in everything from infectious diseases to social justice – and the research community that's driving it.

Medical students collect personal protective gear for front line health-care workers, donate through ��ɫֱ��

geoff.vendeville — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 15:58:58 +0000

Medical students collect personal protective gear for front line health-care workers, donate through ��ɫֱ��

geoff.vendeville Mon, 04/06/2020 - 11:58

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Yezarni Wynn and Justin Boyle sit among the boxes of personal protective equipment the student-led initiative has collected for health-care workers at local hospitals and long-term care homes (photo courtesy of Yezarni Wynn)

Topic

Undergraduate Students

Yezarni Wynn, a medical student at the ��ɫֱ��, is just months away from starting his residency. In the meantime, he doesn’t plan to sit on the sidelines of the COVID-19 crisis while health-care workers put their own lives at risk to treat the sick.

On Twitter and Instagram, Wynn saw his friends in residency posting about how they were limited to “one or two masks” and only a few pairs of gloves for the duration of a 12-hour shift.

“Seeing that circulated on social media kind of scared me because it was a lot of my friends and colleagues who were putting themselves at risk in order to see patients potentially with COVID-19,” Wynn says.

Meanwhile, Thulasie Manokaran, a third-year medical student at Western University, had been reading harrowing news reports out of Italy and other parts of Europe where doctors and nurses have gotten sick and died because they lacked equipment to protect themselves on the job.

Acting separately, the pair saw an opportunity to help and soon found each other through Twitter. They put their heads together to launch a collection drive to amass gloves, masks, hand sanitizer and other urgently needed supplies for health-care workers in hospitals and long-term care homes.

Next, Wynn, Manokaran and the rest of their team, which consists of students from other Ontario universities – Calvin Diep, Sophia Duong and Mia Kibel, all at ��ɫֱ��, and Ali Goodbaum and Rida Tul-Zahra, both from the University of Ottawa – recruited volunteers to canvas businesses across the Greater Toronto Area for donations of essential supplies. They called dentists, tattoo parlours, veterinary clinics and salons, eventually collecting about 83,600 pairs of gloves in unopened boxes, 2,700 surgical masks and hundreds of N95 respirators, a type of mask designed to block almost all airborne particles.

Supplies collected by ��ɫֱ�� are delivered to Mount Sinai Hospital on Friday (photo by Johnny Guatto)

��ɫֱ�� is helping the students transfer half of the supplies they have collected to the Toronto Academic Health Science Network. Including the students’ contribution, ��ɫֱ�� has collected more than 312,000 pairs of gloves, about 9,800 surgical and other types of masks and nearly 8,000 N95 respirators. The university is using guidelines developed by the Joint Centre for Bioethics to ensure the supplies are being shared equitably.

��ɫֱ�� donates masks, gowns and other critical supplies to health-care workers combatting COVID-19

geoff.vendeville — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 16:35:12 +0000

��ɫֱ�� donates masks, gowns and other critical supplies to health-care workers combatting COVID-19

geoff.vendeville Mon, 03/30/2020 - 12:35

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��ɫֱ�� has so far collected more than 250,000 pairs of gloves and nearly 12,000 masks and respirators to donate to its hospital partners (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Coronavirus

��ɫֱ�� Mississauga

��ɫֱ�� Scarborough

Vivek Goel

The ��ɫֱ�� is scouring labs across its three campuses for masks, gloves and other badly-needed protective equipment to donate to health-care workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis.

The university has so far collected more than 250,000 pairs of gloves and nearly 12,000 masks and respirators to give to its hospital partners in the Toronto Academic Health Science Network.

The supplies are being distributed according to an ethical framework developed by ��ɫֱ��’s Joint Centre for Bioethics, which prioritizes health-care providers who face the highest risk of exposure.

“There’s a lot of eagerness to help wherever possible,” said Vivek Goel, ��ɫֱ��’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives. “If we have excess supplies anywhere in the city or in the province, we should really be working to get those to front-line workers so they are protected.

“They are literally putting their lives on the line; we have to do whatever we can to support them.”

The World Health Organization has warned about a global shortage of protective gear caused by rising demand, panic buying and hoarding. Health-care workers in some hard-hit countries are already being forced to treat colleagues who become infected during marathon shifts of treating COVID-19 patients. In Italy, for example, the National Federation of Orders of Doctors and Dental Surgeons has published a list of doctors who have died on the job, with more than 60 names and counting, while in Spain, health-care workers represent 14 per cent of confirmed coronavirus cases, according to the New York Times.

(photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

In Canada, front-line staff are running low on protective equipment just as they prepare for a surge of COVID-19 patients. In response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called on universities and other post-secondary institutions across the country to donate masks and ventilators, and the provincial government is urging local businesses to help where they can to address shortages.

At ��ɫֱ��, individual researchers and departments across the three campuses, in fields as varied as dentistry, chemistry and ecology and evolutionary biology, have made available boxes of much-needed protective equipment.

��ɫֱ�� Mississauga’s department of chemical and physical sciences has pitched in with 5,200 pairs of gloves while the department of biology has set aside surgical masks, N95 masks and more than 30,000 gloves from teaching and research labs.

��ɫֱ�� Scarborough, meanwhile, has collected tens of thousands of medical supplies including masks, gloves, gowns and paper towels.

“It’s just the beginning of the pandemic and our hospitals are having trouble keeping critical safety supplies in stock,” said Holly Yuen, ��ɫֱ�� Scarborough’s environmental health and safety manager.

“It’s encouraging to see our community coming together during these extraordinary times to show that we care for and support our essential medical workers who are on the front line fighting against COVID-19.”

(photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Some protective equipment is being kept in reserve by ��ɫֱ�� for researchers who are undertaking critical work related to COVID-19 or other time-sensitive research. That includes everything from developing COVID-19 medicines and better testing methods to modelling disease transmission.

Some equipment is also being preserved for residence staff, cleaning staff, environmental health and safety workers, campus police and health and wellness employees so they can continue their work safely.

Other Canadian universities, including McGill and McMaster, have also collected medical supplies for local hospitals, as have universities in the U.S. including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

(photo by Patrick Lam)

��ɫֱ��’s donation is just one element of its larger effort to limit the toll of the deadly virus, which has infected more than 750,000 people around the world, according to Goel.

He noted the university has dramatically changed the way in which it works to help “flatten the curve” of the pandemic by cancelling in-person classes and moving to online or remote learning.

��ɫֱ�� also launched a fund last week to support research that’s likely to make a rapid and tangible contribution to the fight against the virus.

Note: This story was updated on March 31, 2020 with new figures about the number of gloves and masks collected.

��ɫֱ�� researchers identify four types of opioid stigma contributing to the current crisis

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 16:37:25 +0000

��ɫֱ�� researchers identify four types of opioid stigma contributing to the current crisis

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 12/02/2019 - 11:37

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Methadone and other types of opioid agonist therapy can be an effective way to treat an opioid use disorder, but researchers found patients face stigma because of methadone's association with heroin use (photo by Hailshadow via Getty Images)

Nicole Bodnar

Topic

Opioids

Graduate Students

Research & Innovation

Researchers from the ��ɫֱ�� have identified four types of opioid-related stigma that depend on a variety of factors, including the context of opioid use, the social identity and networks of the person who is consuming the opioid, and what type of opioid is being consumed, including prescribed opioids.

Each type requires targeted strategies to address the unique stigmas and reduce health inequities, the researchers say. The study was published in the December 2019 edition of the International Journal of Drug Policy.

“We know that stigma is both a driver and consequence of the current overdose crisis, but opioid-related stigma is poorly understood,” said Daniel Buchman, an assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and a senior author of the paper.

North America is in the grips of an opioid-related overdose crisis and stigma, discrimination and prejudice are major contributors. Substance use in general is highly stigmatized, but stigma is a complex concept. Researchers say that there’s a lack of good evidence on the specific sources of opioid stigma, how it manifests in various contexts and its impact on affected groups.

Buchman worked with a research team to conduct a review of publications on opioid-related stigma. The team identified more than 8,500 papers of which 51 were analyzed. Four main themes emerged: interpersonal and structural stigma toward people accessing opioid agonist therapy, which involves taking long-acting opioid medications like methadone and buprenorphine to prevent withdrawal symptoms; stigma related to opioids for the treatment of chronic pain; stigma in health-care settings; and self-stigma.

“Labels like ‘addict,’ ‘drug-seeker’ and ‘junkie’ are barriers to accessing treatment and many people who use opioids internalize these labels and report feelings of self-blame, loathing, despair, shame and moral weakness,” said Melissa McCradden, first-author on the paper and a master of health science student at the ��ɫֱ�� Joint Centre for Bioethics.

Opioid agonist therapy is the gold standard of treatment for opioid use disorders, but researchers found that individuals receiving this treatment face stigma from multiple angles.

For example, methadone’s association with heroin use stigmatizes the medication and the people who use it. The literature suggests that some physicians refuse to prescribe opioid agonist therapy out of fear of being stigmatized by their colleagues. Some patients who are prescribed opioids for cancer pain feel compelled to disclose their identity as a ‘cancer patient’ at the pharmacy in order to differentiate themselves from people on methadone and avoid barriers in accessing their medications.

Stigma in health-care settings was another theme identified by the research team, both in the perception of physicians, nurses and pharmacists toward people who use opioids, as well as within health care’s bureaucratic systems. For example, excessive regulation, paperwork and requirements specific to prescribing opioids may intensify the stigma experienced by people who use opioids.

“The literature suggests that some health-care professionals will make a distinction between patients with legitimate pain who have ‘legitimate’ reasons for accessing opioids, and patients with ‘illegitimate’ pain who do not have legitimate reasons for accessing opioids,” said McCradden.

“This makes a harsh moral distinction between so-called ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ patients. It entrenches stigma.”

Ultimately, researchers say that a paradigm shift is needed to address the structural forms of stigma – including social and economic determinants, laws and public attitudes – in order to have an impact at the individual level.

“Stigma is considered a fundamental cause of population health inequalities and an independent social determinant of health,” said Buchman, who is also a bioethicist at the University Health Network.

The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people live that are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources. Social disadvantages – such as poverty, housing instability and discrimination – often occur simultaneously and can intensify stigma toward those who use opioids. This further marginalizes individuals, exacerbates health inequities and perpetuates stigma.

Buchman and McCradden say that evidence-based strategies to address stigma and its long-term impact on population health are critical to curb the overdose crisis.

“The more familiar you are with a person, the less likely you are to stigmatize them, so there’s tremendous value in including and amplifying the voices of people who use opioids in health policy-making,” said Buchman.

“Humanizing people who use drugs and moving towards decriminalization of all drugs are key to a cultural shift in re-thinking substance use and redressing opioid-related stigma.”

��ɫֱ�� experts and Friesen Prize winner debate gene editing, AI and other disruptive medical technologies

geoff.vendeville — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 15:50:23 +0000

��ɫֱ�� experts and Friesen Prize winner debate gene editing, AI and other disruptive medical technologies

geoff.vendeville Mon, 10/21/2019 - 11:50

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McGill University's Bartha Knoppers, winner of the 2019 Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research, delivers a lecture at an event co-sponsored by ��ɫֱ��'s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (photo by Johnny Guatto)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

Artificial Intelligence

Awards

CIFAR

David Naylor

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Law

Faculty of Medicine

Genomics

Hospital for Sick Children

Massey College

Women's College Hospital

Gene editing represents a promising new pathway to treat disease-causing mutations and other medical conditions. But as with other powerful emerging technologies, it also raises many ethical and legal concerns.

On Thursday, a panel of distinguished ��ɫֱ�� experts and McGill University’s Bartha Knoppers, a world-leading expert on the issues surrounding biomedical research in genetics and genomics, grappled with the ethical dilemmas posed by gene editing and other disruptive new technologies, as well as their potential to revolutionize medicine.

Knoppers said gene editing raises difficult questions involving the rights of children and future generations – questions that erupted into public consciousness last year after a Chinese scientist claimed to have used the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr, to alter human embryos, which were then implanted in the womb of a woman who gave birth to twin girls.

News of the experiment, intended to protect the girls – whose father is HIV-positive – from the virus, was greeted with outrage and even calls for a moratorium on gene editing research.

But Knoppers said a ban would be the wrong approach since it would “silence debate” and wouldn’t cover “outlier” scientists. Instead, she argued for emphasizing the rights of children and patients, while taking into account existing laws and international obligations.

“Let’s see whether there’s some sort of road map for translation as we move to perhaps one day having germline editing under certain conditions,” she said.

Knoppers, the winner of the 2019 Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research, made the remarks during a Friesen Prize lecture at Women’s College Hospital that was co-sponsored by ��ɫֱ��’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, a new interdisciplinary home for scholars studying the impact of technology and innovation on society. Other sponsors included ��ɫֱ��’s Joint Centre for Bioethics, Massey College and Friends of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

In the panel discussion that followed experts, including ��ɫֱ�� President Emeritus David Naylor, picked up on the theme of disruptive technologies and their impact on medicine, focusing on big data and artificial intelligence.

Panelist Gillian Hadfield, i naugural director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society , as well as a ��ɫֱ�� professor of economics and law, remarked on the role of universities in developing governance systems for introducing algorithmic decision-making in all kinds of fields, including health care.

Alan Bernstein, president and CEO of CIFAR (the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) spoke about AI’s untapped potential to provide new diagnostic tools and treatments.

Meanwhile, Ronald Cohn, the president and CEO of the Hospital for Sick Children and chair of ��ɫֱ��’s department of paediatrics in the Faculty of Medicine, described how AI and data are already being used in the hospital’s intensive care unit to save young lives. The unit gathers millions of data points every second – “the amount of data we collect per patient, per second, is the same amount that falls down, in terms of water, Niagara Falls,” Cohn said.

The wealth of data has helped the hospital create an algorithm predicting with 75 per cent accuracy whether a child will have a cardiac arrest, according to Cohn. “If you have an algorithm in place that tells you five minutes ahead of time the worst case scenario, you’re at least all assembled around the bed and you can act when it happens … or maybe you can actually prevent it from happening.”

��ɫֱ�� President Emeritus David Naylor, an expert in health-care policy, said the university has the “firepower” to lead multidisciplinary debates “about where science and society are going, and how health care will evolve” (photo by Johnny Guatto)

For his part, Naylor, an expert in health-care policy who served as ��ɫֱ��’s president from 2005 to 2013, said we now “live in a very different era” – one in which ethical, regulatory and governance issues will cause people to rethink how they do science.

Just over a year ago, he teamed up with ��ɫֱ��’s Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of the sub-field of AI known as deep learning, to write companion pieces for the world’s most widely circulated medical journal about how AI can be harnessed to improve health care.

Naylor, who received the Friesen Prize last year, said Thursday’s panel discussion is exactly the kind of conversation that needs to continue to generate ideas and policy recommendations.

“We have the firepower – between the Joint Centre for Bioethics and the [Schwartz Reisman] Institute and all of the people who are interested in these issues in the city – to begin to have these important multidisciplinary debates about where science and society are going, and how health care will evolve,” he said.

��ɫֱ��'s Joint Centre for Bioethics partners with charity on ethical AI for health

noreen.rasbach — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 18:40:30 +0000

��ɫֱ��'s Joint Centre for Bioethics partners with charity on ethical AI for health

noreen.rasbach Tue, 03/05/2019 - 13:40

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(Image by geralt via Pixabay)

Nicole Bodnar

Topic

Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation

Artificial Intelligence

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

A new partnership with AMS Healthcare, a Canadian charitable organization, is supporting the ��ɫֱ�� Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB) to increase research and inform practice on ethical artificial intelligence (AI) in health care.

“We are thrilled to partner with AMS Healthcare in exploring how AI may be a force for good to improve health and health care, particularly from the perspective of patients and providers,” said Jennifer Gibson, director of JCB, based at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

The gift is supporting JCB’s AI and the Future of Caring initiative, one of four priority themes in its Ethics and AI for Good Health strategy. The other three priority areas are: Public Trust of AI for Health, Ethical Governance of AI for Health and Equity and the Digital Divide.

AI and related digital health technologies hold promise for promoting healthy behaviours, enabling prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease, and addressing equity gaps in health policy and planning.

However, there are important ethical questions about what impact AI-enabled health care and related technologies will have on patient-provider relationships and on public trust. For example, will AI tools replace tasks performed by health-care professionals and impact compassionate care delivery?

“This gift will enable us to ensure ethics and social innovation keep pace with the increasing spread of AI technologies in health, and that ethical concerns are addressed proactively, systematically and by design,” said Gibson (pictured left), who is the Sun Life Financial Chair in Bioethics and associate professor in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation.

The JCB-AMS Healthcare partnership will support interdisciplinary research, scholarship, knowledge creation and translation activities, including pilot studies, seed grant funding and trainee opportunities. It will also build ethics capacity for research and practice of AI in health care by training and mentoring a new generation of ethics researchers and scholars, and integrate ethics knowledge into policy and practice.

“We’re committed to projects that support compassionate, equitable care. Together with the JCB, we will address ethical issues in the use of AI technologies in health care, particularly their potential impact on the patient-provider relationship and the caring environment,” said Gail Paech, CEO of AMS Healthcare, a nurse and Ontario’s former assistant deputy minister of health and long-term care.

AMS Healthcare aims to promote health-care innovation by supporting leadership development and advancing research in both the humanities and health, ultimately to improve the health of all Canadians.

“By creating a vibrant hub of ethics innovation and practice in a rapidly evolving health environment, this partnership between the JCB and AMS Healthcare demonstrates how our school is at the forefront of change in health,” said Professor Adalsteinn Brown, dean of Dalla Lana.

Handing out naloxone doesn't fix opioid crisis: ��ɫֱ�� researchers

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 05:00:00 +0000

Handing out naloxone doesn't fix opioid crisis: ��ɫֱ�� researchers

noreen.rasbach Wed, 02/14/2018 - 00:00

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(photo by Jeff Anderson via Flickr)

Nicole Bodnar

Topic

City & Culture

Health