Students reflect on the Researcher-Practitioner Health Equity Workshop: Bridging the Gap
In February 2012, Carmen Dell, Alycia Fridkin, and Fareen Karachiwalla attended the Researcher-Practitioner Health Equity Workshop: Bridging the Gap. We thank them for this reflection:
It was a pleasure and honour to be student attendees at the Health Equity Workshop in Toronto hosted by the National Collaborating Centre for Determinants of Health (NCCDH) and CIHR’s Institute for Population and Public Health (IPPH). Participating in this 2-day event prompted our thinking around the unique perspectives students bring to the broader public health dialogue on health equity. As students, we strive to be meaningfully engaged in these issues and appreciate the need to build on the work of public health organizations such as NCCDH and IPPH to continue the dialogue and move towards action on addressing health equities.
Students across different health disciplines and professions recognize the importance of social and political factors in shaping the distribution of health, and that the current public health landscape is quite different than it was even 10 years ago. “Knowledge," "collaboration," and "leadership" have taken on new meanings and it is our role as students and future public health leaders to continually challenge the historical constructions of these concepts and work to incorporate new understandings of them into ever-changing public health practice. Globalization, capitalism, and information technology are highly influential in shaping peoples’ health and if we are to effectively address health inequities in a contemporary context, we must understand how these systems intersect to produce health inequities and apply these understanding to our public health work.
We recognize the unique role of the public health sector in championing intersectoral action to address the root causes of inequities. Students in public health are increasingly being trained in interdisciplinary areas that lie outside of the traditional core public health sciences, such as public policy, critical and cultural studies, applied ethics, and land and food systems. Interdisciplinary perspectives should be included in public health training and public health perspectives should be included in the curricula of other professional health programs, such as medicine, nursing, and dentistry. We need to expand the public health discourse on health equity and learn to speak about health equity in ways that are meaningful to other professional arenas. In doing so we can better collaborate with our partners in economics, education, social work, communications, policy and law, for example, in achieving our common health equity goals. Representatives from other sectors should be invited to engage in public health dialogues on health equity at forums like the one hosted by NCCDH and IPPH.
Finally, in an era where statistics, economics and hard sciences dominate the evidence base for policy and decision-making, explicit attention to the underlying ideologies and values that drive our health equity work is being lost in translation. To solicit public support for addressing health inequities, we need to use compelling narratives that point to the implicit values within political agendas and not shy away from using the language of human rights. We need to increasingly engage with the human rights discourses that equity activists have been using for generations and call out injustice as exactly that.
About the authors:
Alycia Fridkin is a PHd student in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia and student member of the board of the Canadian Public Health Association
Carmen Dell is a student at Dalhousie University and former board member of the Canadian Nursing Students Association
Fareen Karachiwalla is a community medicine resident at the University of Toronto
