Celebrating women in public health on International Women's Day

Dr. Katrina Milaney, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences and associate scientific director, population health, at the O’Brien Institute, CSM. She studies the experiences of women and children who are navigating multiple issues and systems to get the supports they need.

Examples include:

1. A project with Inn From the Cold and the Collaborative for Health and Home: Women and Children Working Group looking at the experiences of refugee families whose sponsorship fell through because of interpersonal violence. Due to their status as refugee claimants, the only service they could access was emergency shelter. After meeting with the families, and analysing the federal legislation on refugee protection, Milaney found that current policy does not support the health and wellbeing of women and children when their sponsorship falls apart. These families, now in Canada, can end up in homelessness and being subjugated to the same violence and trauma they fled in their home countries.
2. A project done in partnership with the Aboriginal Standing Committee on Housing and Homelessness and two women Elders looked at the experiences of urban Indigenous women and children in their care as they tried to find safe and affordable housing for their families. Findings revealed both interpersonal and structural violence and racism as the primary barriers and that solutions need to be generated with housing providers and landlords themselves, grounded in the legacy impacts of colonialism and gendered experiences of homelessness and housing insecurity. Structural violence and racism cause harm, they often go unrecognized and they continually re-traumatize women and their children. Cycles of trauma continue as the children grow up and the risk for ill health grows exponentially the longer the trauma goes unrecognized and unaddressed. 

Dr. Sofia Ahmed, MD, is a professor in the Department of Medicine, a member of the O’Brien Institute and the Libin Cardiovascular Institute at the CSM, and one of Canada's top researchers in kidney and cardiovascular disease. Recently, she has been studying the underrepresentation of women in heart failure studies and the need for more sex-specific cardiovascular risk factors in data collection reflecting issues for women.

Her research shows that not only are women underrepresented in heart failure studies, but the ones they are included in do not adequately account for important sex-specific risk factors, such as pregnancy, reproductive lifespan, and hormone therapy use.

This work highlights that in addition to the need for proportional representation of women in heart failure clinical studies, the inclusion of female sex-specific and predominant risk factors in data collection and analysis is needed to guide heart failure care for women.

“There is often a “one-size-fits-all” approach to cardiovascular medicine, and this is not the right approach when the leading cause of premature death in Canadian women is cardiovascular disease (CVD). Death rates from CVD are going down, but at rates much faster in men than in women. They’re actually going up in women under 55 years old. There needs to be a paradigm shift,” says Dr. Ahmed.

Read more in Endocrinology Advisor.

Dr. Christine Walsh, PhD, is a member of the O'Brien Institute and a professor in the Faculty of Social Work. She is currently working on a qualitative study conducted with a former master of social work student and clinical therapist, Hee-Jeong Yoo. The Mothering Study gathered stories of women, who in the face of their own adverse experiences in childhood, lost their children to child welfare. Through their narratives, the researchers came to understand the role of resiliency in reclaiming their children and their identities as good mothers, while challenging societal beliefs about women, and mothering.

The message, Walsh says, is that sometimes, women must overcome inordinate challenges on their journey to becoming a good mother. Beyond the traditional research outputs, Walsh and Yoo have created a book called My Momma Loves Me, in which an inquisitive, bushy-tailed red squirrel takes the reader on an adventure across Canada sharing depictions of motherly love of twelve animal moms. During the red squirrel's journey she meets a host of animal mothers including a majestic admiral butterfly bravely depositing her eggs, and a killer whale mother and grandmother sharing their family tune. This poetic story enchants with vivid expressions of the unconditional love all mothers have for their children. The book will be available in April 2023, in time for Mother’s Day.

Dr. Shannon Ruzycki, MD, is an assistant professor in the departments of medicine and community health sciences, a member of the O’Brien Institute and Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta at the CSM, and a general internist.

Her research focuses on the experiences of doctors and uses many different methods to describe sex- and gender-based differences in experiences. Her research shows that even though men and women physicians work in the same places, they don't experience the same workplace environment when it comes to safety, discrimination, harassment, or inequities.

Doctors and medical researchers have long assumed that their work is neutral and that it doesn't matter if a patient is a woman or a man, they will be treated the same. But this isn't true. Ruzycki has found through her research that we have designed a healthcare system that takes better care of men patients with better research for men patients than for women. This is medical discrimination, and it creates inequalities and inequities for women (and others!). Ruzycki aims to show people how their assumptions lead to these differences and highlight how this can be changed.

Read her recent publication in Nature, Equity, diversity and inclusion are foundational research skills, which she co-authored with Dr. Sofia Ahmed. 

Dr. Jamie Benham, MD, PhD, is a member of the O’Brien and Libin Cardiovascular Institutes, an early career investigator in the departments of medicine and community health sciences at the Cumming School of Medicine, and an Endocrinologist at Alberta Health Services.

Her research program focuses on women’s health and aims to improve reproductive and cardiometabolic health across the lifespan in individuals with reproductive endocrine diseases including polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Women with PCOS are at increased risk of developing cardiometabolic disease including obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. Her research has shown that exercise training can improve markers of reproductive and cardiometabolic health in women with PCOS.

PCOS is a common endocrine disorder that is associated with many chronic health conditions, like diabetes and depression, which can negatively impact health in the long term. Despite its prevalence, studies have shown that it often takes three or more years for a woman to be diagnosed with PCOS and treatment options are limited. Benham’s research program aims to understand how PCOS impacts women living in Alberta, to identify care gaps and to improve care pathways for diagnosis and management.

Read more in Utoday.

Dr. Amy Metcalfe, PhD, is a member of the O’Brien Institute and the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute (ACHRI), and an associate professor in the departments of obstetrics and gynecology, medicine, and community health sciences at the CSM.  She is also the Maternal and Child Health Program Director, ACHRI.

The GROWW (Guiding interdisciplinary Research On Women’s and girls health and Wellbeing) program, which she co-leads with Drs. Erin Brennand (UCalgary), Jennifer Gordon (URegina) and Ryan Van Lieshout (McMaster) is changing the way women’s health research is conducted in Canada by breaking down disciplinary and institutional silos and taking an intersectional approach to learning more about girls’ and women’s health across the lifespan.

GROWW is a national interdisciplinary training program that brings together clinical and graduate trainees, post-doctoral fellows, early career researchers (ECRs), established researchers, and professionals from within and outside of academia with a shared passion and interest in girls’ and women’s health and wellbeing. GROWW addresses the critical gap of girls and women’s health being taught in silos and supports career prospects of trainees and ECRs through partnerships across sectors.

The next deadline for applications to join the GROWW cohort is May 1st, 2023. Learn more.

Advisers and facilitators from Miskanawah are working with a multidisciplinary team of University of Calgary researchers, including principal investigator Dr. Sonja Wicklum, MD, on the Wolf Trail (Makoyoh’sokoi) program which aims to improve health for Indigenous women and two-spirited persons.

The series of exercise and health education sessions takes a holistic approach focusing on the need to look at the mental, emotional, spiritual and physical aspects of a person in order to support health changes that last.

Participants come together to experience new types of physical activity, learn about nutrition and share their personal experiences in a safe, supportive, and culturally appropriate environment.

Recent support by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) allows the program’s duration for participants to expand to six months from 10 weeks, to support participants in 10 Indigenous communities.

Read more in Utoday.

Dr. Erin Brennand, MD, is lead for the Sex, Gender and Women's Health Research Unit, O'Brien Institute, and Department Head, Obstetrics and Gynecology, CSM. 

Her research focuses on female reproductive health across the lifespan, and she particularly enjoys investigating midlife health as this post childbearing period is least prioritized by health care and health researchers.

There is a need to generate new information about how reproductive health in midlife can be improved through both evidence based preventative and therapeutic strategies. A primary focus of her work is pelvic organ prolapse (when ones bladder, bowel or uterus lose support and descend into or out of the vagina), which is a common consequence of childbirth and one of the most frequent reasons that hysterectomy, removal of the uterus, is performed in Canada. There may be better ways to prevent and treat this condition, but the lack of research funding and attention has resulted in little progress in the last 50 years.

Another focus of her work is menopause, a nearly universal condition for females that can result in mood changes, physical symptoms, and social isolation, yet it is shrouded in shame and stigma. This means that people are not empowered to seek information and that health care services do not sufficiently meet the needs of females during this midlife transition.

Her work is driving innovations in how pelvic organ prolapse is treated in Canada. Locally, there has been a shift from hysterectomy based prolapse surgery to preserving the uterus, which results in shorter surgery and less complications and offers a greater degree of choice and bodily autonomy for patients. Brennand is also running a cohort study of over 300 patients to answer the question of whether uterine preserving surgery is equivalent or, actually superior to, hysterectomy based surgery in term of prolapse cure and functional outcomes that are important to patients. Through educating the next generation of clinicians in gynaecology and urogynecology, these techniques are being brought to other areas of Canada to make these innovations available to other patient populations.

Dr. Deinera Exner-Cortens, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, an adjunct associate professor in the Faculty of Social Work, and is jointly appointed to the Department of Psychiatry, CSM.

Her lab conducts research to understand why some youth are at greater risk for teen dating violence than others. For example, they have found that cisgender girls and non-binary youth in Canada are at higher risk for experiencing psychological dating violence as compared to cisgender boys. This may be due societal factors like sexism and transphobia, which place girls and non-binary youth at increased risk for violence. They also work on evaluating violence prevention programs (like the @YYCSsexualhealth WiseGuyz program) that focus on gender, because of the important role gender plays in understanding and preventing violence. 

Teen dating violence impacts a substantial minority of Canadian youth. Youth who experience dating violence are at higher risk for mental health problems and re-victimization in adulthood. Youth who are marginalized due to the oppression they face in society (e.g., due to gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status) are at higher risk of experiencing dating violence. As such, teen dating violence prevention programs need to focus on root causes of violence, like sexism, racism, and homophobia.