Located in the heart of downtown Vancouver, UBC Robson Square is a vibrant learning centre that brings unique UBC offerings to the growing downtown core and is accessible to learners throughout the Lower Mainland.
The Great Northern Way Campus, located just southeast of the downtown Vancouver core, is a collaboration between UBC, Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and the B.C. Institute of Technology.
75 health care facilities including 22 large tertiary and medium regional hospitals provide clinical education opportunities for both undergraduate and post graduate medical students.
Rare disease actually isn't so rare. It's generally defined as a genetic malady affecting one out of every 2,000 or more people. But that is still too small a percentage...
Student website reduces food waste and helps people in need Raja Wariach, a fourth year human geography major at UBC's Okanagan campus has developed a unique and sustainable solution to match...
UBC and Vineyard Networks partner on advanced networks research Internationally respected Kelowna-based company Vineyard Networks is collaborating with UBC to create a new approach to data storage and retrieval. This partnership...
Something old, something new or something blue? Early reflections on (yet another) health reform in England.
Since the publication of the White Paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS on NHS reform in July 2010 the Government has been embroiled in a running debate about the future of the NHS. How new are these proposals and to what extent do they build on the past? This paper will discuss some of the key proposed changes and current experience in developments in England. The presentation will examine some of the experience of newly formed clinical commissioning groups but also examine whether the new policies are an advance towards the market being driven by the Conservative Party as many healthcare professionals, patients and coalition and opposition politicians fear.
Speaker:
Stephen Peckham BSc., MA(Econ), HMFPH
Reader in Health Policy
Director Policy Research Unit in Commissioning and the Healthcare System
Stephen Peckham is Reader in Health Policy in the department of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Director of the Department of Health Funded Policy Research Unit in Commissioning and the Healthcare System. From 2005 to 2008 he was an academic advisor to the NIHR Service Delivery and Organisation and both Academic and Centre Director of the Research Programme National Co-ordinating Centre from 2008. He previously worked in local government and the voluntary sector and has been a Research Fellow at the University of the West of England and the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of Southampton. Between 1999 and 2005 he was Head of Sociology and Social Policy at Oxford Brookes University. His main research interests are in health policy analysis, service delivery and organisation, primary care and public health. Current research includes evaluation of new clinical commissioning groups, examining patient and public involvement in commissioning, exploring the public health role of general practice and evaluating health system change in London. He has published widely on health and social policy and health services research with books on primary care, health and social policy and public health ethics.
The 3MT UBC semi-finals are complete after a stellar effort from our three competitors – Stephen Pan, Jason Tan de Bibiana and Alden Blair.
* Congratulations to Alden Blair - awarded the People's Choice award.
* Congratulations to Jason Tan de Bibiana - awarded runner-up in the UBC semi-final and now progressing to the UBC final.
Please support Jason at the UBC final on Friday March 2 at 12pm in the Graduate Student Centre Ballroom 6371 Crescent Road.
Each year at the UBC's Celebrate Research Week delivers on the promise of its name with dozens of fascinating and informative events open to the UBC community and the general public.
One of the most prestigious event of Celebrate Research Week is the annual Wyman Lecture and the Killam Conversation. This year it is being held on Friday, March 2, 2012, 4-6 pm in the Dodson Room (#302) at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 1961 East Mall (V6T 1Z1). Everyone is cordially invited to attend.
This year's Wyman Lecture is presented by Dr. Robert G. Evans, O.C., Professor Emeritus, Economics and Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, UBC.
Lecture Details:
"It Seemed Like a Good Idea... Innovation in a Wider Context" The conviction that innovation will make the world a better place seems at present virtually universal. Research is then celebrated as the key to more rapid innovation, although the connection is not as direct as we researchers would like to think. But the recent success of Dutch researchers in genetically modifying the highly lethal H5N1 (bird flu) virus to make it more readily transmissible among humans, might at least give us pause. More generally, the inevitability of both unintended consequences, and of intended but malign consequences, implies that the uncritical celebration and promotion of innovation must rest on an underlying presumption either that innovations are universally, on balance, benign, or that our societies embody processes to screen out or suppress any adverse effects. Good luck with that.
The Killam Conversation is generated between Dr. Evans and a panel of UBC-based scholars:
Dr. Michael Law (moderator)
Faculty, Centre for Health Services and Policy Research,
Assistant Professor, School of Population and Public Health
Dr. Gillian Hanley
Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Population and Public Health
Ms. Lindsay Hedden
PhD Candidate, School of Population and Public Health
Dr. Barbara Mintzes
Member, Drug Assessment Working Group, Therapeutics Initiative
Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics
Dr. Craig Mitton
Senior Scientist, Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation, Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, VGH
Associate Professor, School of Population and Public Health
The event demonstrates the tremendous contributions of the Killam Trusts to advance research at UBC, supporting faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The Wyman Lecture is in honour of the late Robert Wyman, Killam Trustee (1987-2007) and Chancellor Emeritus of UBC. Mr. John Montalbano, a Killam Trustee, will introduce the event.
Sponsored by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and organized by the CCS-UBC Cancer Prevention Centre, this day-long workshop will bring together attendees who are involved in occupational health and safety across the country, and who represent research, industry, government, and community organizations.
Speakers:
Kenneth Geiser, PhD, occupational and environmental health and policy expert, from the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, University of Massachusetts, USA
Paul Demers, PhD, Occupational Cancer Research Centre, Canada
Anne-Marie Nicol, PhD, from CAREX Canada
Carolyn Gotay, PhD, Canadian Cancer Society Chair in Cancer Primary Prevention, Professor, University of British Columbia
Registration for the event is free for up to 150 participants and registration is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Epidemiology of temporal increase:
K. S. Joseph MD, PhD
Professor, Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynaecology
Clinical concerns:
Melanie Basso, RN, MSN, PNC(C), Senior Practice Leader- Perinatal, Acute Perinatal Program
Cheryl Davies, RN, Med, Vice President, Ambulatory Programs, BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre
Surveillance issues:
Lily Lee RN, MSN, MPH, Surveillance Lead, Perinatal Services BC
Learning objectives:
To provide participants with
Information on recent developments in the field
Multidisciplinary perspectives
Critical analysis of important topics from a substantive and methodologic perspective (through presentation and discussion of Journal articles, etc)
A forum for discussing research ideas and research in progress
For general questions please contact Ariadna Fernandez (Ariadna.Fernandez@phsa.ca)
For suggestions regarding topics for future rounds please contact one of the co-leaders
Patricia Janssen (Patti.Janssen@ubc.ca) or K.S. Joseph (kjoseph@cw.bc.ca)
This weekend event starts on Saturday, March 10, 2012, 7-9 pm with the Canadian Movie Premier - "Surviving Japan" with director Chris Nowland
March 11th, 2012, 9 am - 5 pm
Day of Inquiry
To register and for details visit www.pgs.ca or call 604-324-1125. Sponsored by: Physicians for Global Survival (Canada), Physicians for Social Responsibility, Simon Fraser University, UBC Dept of Pediatrics - BC Children's Hospital and NextGenU.
UBC is internationally recognized for its contributions to the creation of “Population Health” as an interdisciplinary field concerned with the powerful role of a host of non-medical determinants of health, development, and well-being across the life course, particularly social and economic factors. The Population Health Speakers Series aims to bring together faculty, students, practitioners and policymakers interested in these issues. The series will have a particular focus on the social sciences and their intersections with other disciplines within population health. Each monthly meeting will feature an invited scholar who is conducting cutting-edge research integrating innovative theoretical perspectives and/or developing novel methods for use in advancing population health science and improving practice and policy. The speaker's presentation and subsequent "brainstorming" dialogue with the audience will be aimed to appeal to a broad range of interests and have great potential for informing the ideas, research, and practices of faculty, students, and local agency representatives.
SFU International invites you to a multimedia presentation on TB, HIV, human rights, access to medicines, and global health. Jonathan Smith, Director of the Visual Ethnography Project at Yale University, will be giving an exclusive preview of an in-progress documentary about families caught up in the southern African TB and HIV epidemics. He will be describing his experiences living with four TB and HIV infected mine workers in rural South Africa as a part of his graduate research in epidemiology, screening documentary video from his field work, and hosting an open discussion on human rights and global health.
This event is free and open to the public but advanced registration is required. Please click here to register.
The BC Forum of the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research (www.ccghr.ca) is hosting its inaugural conference to promote global health research networking among individuals & institutions and provide mentorship to the next generation of researchers.
Presenter: Dr. Glenys Webster
Director, Chemicals, Health and Pregnancy study (CHirP)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research
Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University
Statistics for Lunch? is an informal meeting event that will be offered every two months. Each meeting will focus on an individual topic in data analysis and is aimed at SPPH students, post-docs and staff who have questions about analytic methods.
This month’s topic is: MISSING DATA!
You do not need to bring anything to the meeting; this meeting is an opportunity to participate in discussions, get feedback, and field questions from other students. The meeting is also an opportunity to network with other students who are facing similar analytic challenges in their work.
About the coordinator: Jason Sutherland has a PhD in statistics and a passion for helping students with their methods questions and frustrations. He will facilitate discussions and provide input if needed.
How did Prescription Drugs become a Leading Cause of Death? The Risk Proliferation Syndrome
Prescription drugs are one of the most beneficial parts of modern medicine and yet they have become a leading cause of falls, accidents, hospitalizations, and death. The lecture will explain The Risk Proliferation Syndrome of institutional practices that expose more patients to risks of harm than need be. Open discussion about the Syndrome and how to reduce harms will follow.
Presenter: Donald Light
Donald Light is a professor social medicine and comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. A founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, he is doing research on justice issues in global pharmaceutical policy. He has received the William Foote Whyte distinguished career award for applied sociology.
OFF TRACK, ONSIDE? REALISING THE WATER AND SANITATION MDG MAY BE POSSIBLE BUT WHAT WILL IT ACHIEVE?
Lyla Mehta, Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, Brighton, England
5-6:30 pm, Wednesday, March 28 2012
Green College, Coach House
Many decisions in health care hinge of trade-offs between costs and benefits. Provincial drug benefit committees making resource allocation decisions have to judge whether the additional health benefits of new medications outweigh the additional costs. Physicians making clinical decisions must decide if the benefits of a therapeutic option outweigh the harms. In such situations, evidence alone is insufficient and preferences form a crucial component in making high quality decisions. However, experts (committee members, physicians) commonly use their own preferences even though evidence suggests these serve as poor proxies for patients and the public. This presentation will describe some recent methodological advances for integrating preferences of the public into population decisions, and some more conceptual ideas for integrating individual preferences into clinical decisions.
Speaker: Nick Bansback, UBC School of Population and Public Health
Nick Bansback joined the School of Population and Public Health in 2012. He obtained his PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK. His program of research seeks inform policies and practices in health through the application of decision theory.
A timely examination of human values and the health issues that affect us all, ¡Salud! looks at the curious case of Cuba, a cash-strapped country with what the BBC calls ‘one of the world’s best health systems.’ From the shores of Africa to the Americas, !Salud! hits the road with some of the 28,000 Cuban health professionals serving in 68 countries, and explores the hearts and minds of international medical students in Cuba -- now numbering 30,000, including nearly 100 from the USA. Their stories plus testimony from experts around the world bring home the competing agendas that mark the battle for global health—and the complex realities confronting the movement to make healthcare everyone’s birth right.
Professor. Jerry Spiegel of SPPH, who has carried out research in Cuba for 15 years, will be present for discussion of the film
Ambient air pollution is associated with a considerable, and growing, burden of global disease. In 2000, the World Health Organization estimated that fine particulate air pollution caused 800,000 deaths and 6.4 million lost years of healthy life in the world’s major cities, with developing countries of South and East Asia accounting for two-thirds of this burden. As part of the Global Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) 2010 Study, much more extensive estimates of global air pollution exposure and disease burden have been developed. This presentation will review the methodology used to develop these estimates, with an emphasis on novel approaches. From an exposure perspective, in 2005, 89% of the world’s population lived in areas where the World Health Organization Air Quality Guideline for particulate matter was exceeded. Between 1990 and 2005 a 6% increase in global population-weighted particulate matter and a 1% decrease in global population-weighted ozone concentrations was apparent, highlighted by increases in East, South and Southeast Asia and decreases in North America and Europe. Coupled with demographic transitions and increasing evidence of the magnitude and scope of air pollution-related health impacts, a substantially larger attributable disease burden is apparent and forecasted for the future.
