Vivien Runnels

University of Ottawa · School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine; Faculty of Medicine; Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services, Faculty of Social Sciences

Objectives : To revise a sex and gender appraisal tool for systematic reviews (SGAT-SR) and apply it to Cochrane sepsis reviews. Study design and setting : The revision process was informed by existing literature on sex, gender, intersectionality, and feedback from an expert advisory board. We revised the items to consider additional factors assoc...

Background Gender roles and relations affect both the drivers and experiences of health worker migration, yet policy responses rarely consider these gender dimensions. This lack of explicit attention from source country perspectives can lead to inadequate policy responses. Methods A Canadian-led research team partnered with co-investigators in the...

Background: Gender roles affect health worker migration and their migration experiences, but policy responses have rarely considered the gender dimensions of health worker migration. This invisibility and lack of attention can lead to social, health and labour market inequities. Methods: A Canadian-led research team with co-investigators in the Phi...

Background: Gender roles and relations affect both the drivers and experiences of health worker migration, yet policy responses rarely consider these gender dimensions. This lack of explicit attention from source country perspectives can lead to inadequate policy responses. Methods: A Canadian-led research team with co-investigators in the Philippi...

Both workplace mental health and gender equity issues are in the spotlight in Canada as they are internationally. Accordingly, it is timely for Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) to systematically consider sex, gender, and intersecting identities. Four cross-cutting priorities emerged from a focused analysis of the literature: (1) targeted outreac...

Background Regulation of the medical tourism and public health sectors overlap in many instances, raising questions of how patient safety, economic growth, and health equity can be protected. The case of Guatemala is used to explore how the regulatory challenges posed by medical tourism should be dealt with in countries seeking to grow this sector....

Background Although the global growth of privatized health care services in the form of medical tourism appears to generate economic benefits, there is debate about medical tourism’s impacts on health equity in countries that receive medical tourists. Studies of the processes of economic globalization in relation to social determinants of health su...

Abstract Background Accurate reporting on sex and gender in health research is integral to ensuring that health interventions are safe and effective. In Canada and internationally, governments, research organizations, journal editors, and health agencies have called for more inclusive research, provision of sex-disaggregated data, and the integrat...

Youth Futures is a complex program supported by a local partnership aimed at increasing access to post-secondary education among youth from lower-income family backgrounds. Although program stakeholders have recognized the importance of evaluation since the program’s inception, embedding an evaluative culture and building capacity for evaluation pr...

Background This study sought to better understand the drivers of skilled health professional migration, its consequences, and the various strategies countries have employed to mitigate its negative impacts. The study was conducted in four countries—Jamaica, India, the Philippines, and South Africa—that have historically been “sources” of health wor...

Background: Dramatic increases in the migration of human resources for health (HRH) from developing countries like the Philippines can have consequences on the sustainability of health systems. In this paper, we trace the outflows of HRH from the Philippines, map out its key causes and consequences, and identify relevant policy responses. Methods:...

Do encontro entre saúde e relações internacionais se originam os conceitos e práticas contemporâneos da saúde global e da diplomacia da saúde. Mas tal encontro só se estabeleceu em função do processo de globalização. A crise econômica sistêmica e global, expondo as brechas estruturais do capitalismo global, aprofundou as desigualdades preexistentes...

The WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel was implemented in May 2010. The present commentary offers some insights into what is known about the Code five years on, as well as its potential impact, drawing from interviews with health care and policy stakeholders from a number of 'source' and 'destination' c...

Global health diplomacy (GHD) describes the practices by which governments and non-state actors attempt to coordinate and orchestrate global policy solutions to improve global health. As an emerging field of practice, there is little academic work that has comprehensively examined and synthesized the theorization of Global Health Diplomacy (GHD), n...

Background This paper arises from a four-country study that sought to better understand the drivers of skilled health worker migration, its consequences, and the strategies countries have employed to mitigate negative impacts. The four countries—Jamaica, India, the Philippines, and South Africa—have historically been “sources” of skilled health wor...

Background: There is increasing recognition of sex/gender differences in health and the importance of identifying differential effects of interventions for men and women. Yet, to whom the research evidence does or does not apply, with regard to sex/gender, is often insufficiently answered. This is also true for systematic reviews which synthesize...

Health opportunities and risks have become increasingly global in both cause and consequence. Governments have been slow to recognise the global dimensions of health, although this is beginning to change. A new concept - global health diplomacy (GHD) - has evolved to describe how health is now being positioned within national foreign policies and e...

The global context for the research includes: a global health worker (HW) shortage; a dramatic increase of HW migration over the last decade; the need to develop and sustain developing countries’ health systems; and reliance of high income countries (HICs) on HWs who migrate from low and middle income countries (LMICs) such as India. Investigating...

Systematic review methodology includes the rigorous collection, selection, and evaluation of data in order to synthesize the best available evidence for health practice, health technology assessments, and health policy. Despite evidence that sex and gender matter to health outcomes, data and analysis related to sex and gender are frequently absent...

The idea for this survey emanated from desk research and two meetings for researchers that discussed medical tourism and out-of-country health care, which were convened by some of the authors of this article (VR, CP and RL). A Cross Border Health Care Survey was drafted by a number of the authors and administered to Canadian physicians via the Cana...

From the post World War II period through to the present, scientific research and policy has increasingly reflected acceptance and implementation of a view that public interests are better served through public participation. Built on principles of democratic participation, community-based research (CBR) can produce new knowledge through the integr...

Canada has been regarded as a model global citizen with firm commitments to multilateralism. It has also played important roles in several international health treaties and conventions in recent years. There are now concerns that its interests in health as a foreign policy goal may be diminishing. This article reports on a thematic analysis of key...

Medical tourism is commonly perceived and popularly depicted as an economic issue, both at the system and individual levels. The decision to engage in medical tourism, however, is more complex, driven by patients’ unmet need, the nature of services sought and the manner by which treatment is accessed. In order to beneficially employ the opportuniti...

Bon voyage: Travelling Well: Essais sur le tourisme médical Essays in Medical Tourism Institut de recherche Institute of sur la santé des Population populations Health Vous êtes libres de reproduire, distribuer et communiquer ce travail au public en respectant les conditions suivantes 1 : • Vous devez citer le nom de l'auteur original. • A chaque r...

To document the experience of adult food insecurity in an urban context, a community-university research collaboration conducted a qualitative study of adults' personal experiences of food insecurity and its perceived effects on aspects of health, using individual interviews with food-insecure adults. The study was designed to gain understanding of...

Questionnaire. List of interview questions for regional health authorities and hospitals.

Developed countries' gains in health human resources (HHR) from developing countries with significantly lower ratios of health workers have raised questions about the ethics or fairness of recruitment from such countries. By attracting and/or facilitating migration for foreign-trained HHR, notably those from poorer, less well-resourced nations, rec...

Health-related travel, also referred to as "medical tourism" is historically well-known. Its emerging contemporary form suggests the development of a form of globalised for-profit healthcare. Medical tourism to India, the focus of a recent conference in Canada, provides an example of the globalisation of healthcare. By positioning itself as a low-c...

One manifestation of globalization is medical tourism. As its implications remain largely unknown, we reviewed claimed benefits and risks. Driven by high health-care costs, long waiting periods, or lack of access to new therapies in developed countries, most medical tourists (largely from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe) seek care in...

To examine the use of sex- and gender-based analysis (SGBA) in systematic reviews of cardiovascular health in order to strengthen the evidence base for clinical practice and policy. To determine the current status of SGBA in systematic reviews, an appraisal tool was developed by the research team and applied by an independent reviewer to a random s...

Although many people agree that there is something morally troubling in the phenomenon of brain drain, it is also often claimed that the substantial benefits it can bring to source communities may go some way to balance, or even outweigh, its negative consequences. It has been suggested that source countries and remaining family members and communi...

Health-care workers serving homeless persons often face difficulties in addressing the needs of this population due to the complexity of the health challenges and gaps in clinical knowledge. How can health-care workers enhance their ability to care for this population? The authors explore the learning and knowledge-integration strategies of nurses...

This paper focuses on some of the ethical issues which may arise when conducting research in the context of homelessness. These issues are considered from the viewpoints of researchers, research coordinators and interviewers, drawing from their extensive real world experience. In addition to negotiating the complex context of homelessness, communit...

Health-care workers serving homeless persons often face difficulties in addressing the needs of this population due to the complexity of the health challenges and gaps in clinical knowledge. How can health-care workers enhance their ability to care for this population? The authors explore the learning and knowledge-integration strategies of nurses...

Bibliometric analysis can be used to objectively compare the usage of terms over time. The purpose of this research was to compare the use of population health, health promotion, and public health using bibliometric indicators of the published literature. Bibliometric indicators, such as scientific productivity and the overlap between the terms, we...

Objective Bibliometric analysis can be used to objectively compare the usage of terms over time. The purpose of this research was to compare the use of population health, health promotion, and public health using bibliometric indicators of the published literature. Methods Bibliometric indicators, such as scientific productivity and the overlap be...

This article presents the results of a needs assessment of family physicians and residents concerning the provision of mental health care and an implementation evaluation of a multidisciplinary mental health service demonstration project, linking 2 family practices with mental health services of a general hospital. Family physicians and residents r...

This article presents the results of a needs assessment of family physicians and residents concerning the provision of mental health care and an implementation evaluation of a multidisciplinary mental health service demonstration project, linking 2 family practices with mental health services of a general hospital. Family physicians and residents r...

The literature on health inequalities demonstrates that where one lives impacts one's health. This report details the development of tools to investigate the spatial relationship between inequalities in neighborhood quality and health disparities. A combination of spatial statistics, geographic information system (GIS) concepts and capabilities, an...

The Looking After Children (LAC) approach is now widely used internationally in child welfare. The approach, which originated almost two decades ago, aims systematically to raise the standard of corporate parenting and improve the outcome of young people in out-of-home care. The Assessment and Action Record (AAR) from LAC is used to monitor young p...

Social autopsy methodology has been useful in uncovering patterns leading to untimely deaths in many different contexts. Although patterns of early deaths have often been detected among individuals who are homeless, social autopsies are particularly difficult to carry out in this population. This paper provides a template for carrying out a social...