Sylvia Reitmanova

Carleton University · School of Social Work

Like many coastal communities, St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, has experienced dramatic economic and institutional restructuring that has negatively impacted on individual, family, and community health. Visible minority immigrants tend to be more negatively impacted by economic downturns and the associated gap between identifi...

By examining the role of the Canadian press in framing health and social issues of immigrants, the authors highlight the issues of power and social injustice in which immigrant health is constructed and handled by Canada’s health policies. Critical discourse analysis of 273 articles from 10!major Canadian dailies over one decade showed that pre-exi...

Drawing on critical discourse analysis of Canadian press coverage of the immigrant tuberculosis problem, we expose the complex relationship between press-constructed discourses of immigrant health and current tuberculosis control policies in Canada. The focus of these policies is on screening and surveillance of immigrants rather than addressing so...

Objective: In this article, we adopt a syndemic approach to immigrant tuberculosis (TB) in Canada as a way of challenging contemporary epidemiological models of infectious diseases that tend to racialize and medicalize the risk of infections in socio-economically disadvantage populations and obscure the role of social conditions in sustaining the...

Current tuberculosis control strategies in Canada rely exclusively on screening and surveillance of immigrants. This is consistent with current public health discourse that attributes the high burden of immigrant tuberculosis to the exposure of immigrants to infection in their country of origin. The effectiveness of control strategies is questionab...

Cross-cultural undergraduate medical education in North America lacks conceptual clarity. Consequently, school curricula are unsystematic, nonuniform, and fragmented. This article provides a literature review about available conceptual models of cross-cultural medical education. The clarification of these models may inform the development of effect...

Cultural diversity education is a required curriculum component at all accredited North American medical schools. Each medical school determines its own content and pedagogical approaches. This preliminary study maps the approaches to cultural diversity education in English Canadian medical schools. A review of 14 English Canadian medical school we...

In this paper we present the current state of cultural diversity education for undergraduate medical students in three English-speaking countries: the United Kingdom (U.K.), United States (U.S.) and Canada. We review key documents that have shaped cultural diversity education in each country and compare and contrast current issues. It is beyond the...

This article draws on an environmental scan and interviews with visible minority immigrants in a small urban Atlantic community to report on gaps and opportunities for improving access to information about primary mental health care services and barriers to utilization of these services. Information about services was limited and did not specifical...

Despite growing recognition of the need to increase cultural diversity undergraduate education in the UK, the US and Canada, there is a lack of cohesion in the development and delivery of cultural diversity teaching in medical schools in these three countries. This article highlights 12 tips for developing cultural diversity education in undergradu...

Race and ethnicity are well-established epidemiological categories that relate to the patients' risk of exposure and their susceptibility/resistance to disease. However, this association creates the notion that factors other than a personal identity need not be held responsible for patients' health problems. This work deconstructs the notion of rac...

The salient role of knowledge translation process, by which knowledge is put into practice, is increasingly recognized by various research stakeholders. However, medical schools are slow in providing medical students and health professionals engaged in research with the sufficient opportunities to examine more closely the facilitators and barriers...

Keywords: Cultural Diversity, Medical Education, Undergraduate English Curriculum Purpose of Study: Cultural diversity education is a required curriculum component at all accredited Canadian medical undergraduate education programs. The purpose of this study is to map the response to the new LCME requirement in English Canadian medical schools sin...

This qualitative pilot study explored the mental health needs of visible minority immigrants in St. John's--a small urban center in Atlantic Canada with limited ethnoracial diversity and ethnospecific infrastructure. The study examined the facilitators and barriers to maintaining immigrants' mental health and their perspectives on availability and...

Cross-cultural medical education and training is the most appropriate response to health requirements in the current world of globalization, migration and free market economy. This article explains the background to immigrant health issues and suggests the directions that education at medical schools could take in order to foster students' knowledg...

The purpose of this qualitative study was to document and explore the maternity health care needs and the barriers to accessing maternity health services from the perspective of immigrant Muslim women living in St. John's, Canada. A purposive approach was used in recruiting six individuals to participate in in-depth semi-structured interviews. Data...