A vision of social justice and health equity

Today Global Health Research and Policy publishes an article exploring interventions in global health practice and policy and how collaborations can be made easier between scholars, service providers and educators. Co-author Karline Wilson-Mitchell explains more.

Ryerson University’s Centre for Global Health and Health Equity (CGHHE) is a hub which allows scholars, service providers and educators to collaborate and explore interventions in global health practice and policy.

Over 60 academic researchers, community agency representatives and students attended a global health forum titled Taking Action on Violence through Research, Policy and Practice on April 30th, 2014 in Toronto, Canada.

The forum was a fruitful think tank in which participants engaged in a manner reminiscent of multidisciplinary global health and community development teams to promote health as a human right.

CGHHE embodies a shared vision of social justice and health equity that binds multidisciplinary group members from the fields of Nursing, Geography, Social Work, Psychology, Nutrition, Midwifery Education and Early Childhood Studies.

CGHHE embodies a shared vision of social justice and health equity that binds multidisciplinary group members from the fields of Nursing, Geography, Social Work, Psychology, Nutrition, Midwifery Education and Early Childhood Studies.

The Centre provides a germination bed for high quality interventions that are community-based and informed by the social determinants of health. It also provides fertile ground for social innovations, sustainable solutions and equitable global partnerships.

The Taking Action on Violence Forum addressed the startling statistics revealed by the World Health Organization Global Status Report on Violence Prevention indicating that homicidal violence rates were 6.7 per 100,000 in 2012.

Greater still is the rate of intimate partner violence, estimated at 30% (WHO, 2013) , violence against children at 36.6%, and violence against senior at 6%. Some of the recommendations by keynote speaker Patricia O’Campo are depicted in one of many posters created by a graphic artist who was commissioned to capture ideas expressed by speakers and participants at the Forum.

Other concepts and recommendations offered by discussion participants include the following:

  1. Violence should be viewed as a universal mechanism that produces social suffering in all settings for both low and high resource countries.
  2. Structural violence and its contributing factors can be mitigated by thoughtful policy and practice change.
  3. A multipronged approach is required to transform the dominant social norms that pervade our societies and perpetuate violence.
  4. Adequate research funding is required to make meaningful changes in violence at the macro ecological level.

This forum, comprised of so many passionate, motivated, and diverse disciplines, might very well be a model for successful global health partnerships in the future.

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