Navigating the Unique Medical Needs of Refugees

Transcription

1 Navigating the Unique Medical Needs of Refugees March 11, 2016 TCU Place Featured Speakers: Dr. Anna Banerji, the new Director of Global and Indigenous Health at Continuing Professional Development, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, is a paediatric infectious, tropical disease specialist and global health specialist. She has trained in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Harvard University, where she completed her MPH in International Health. In 2007 she created the Immigrant Health and Infectious Disease Clinic, a clinic for immigrant and refugee children. In 2009 she created the Canadian Refugee Health Conference which evolved with their American counter parts to become North American Refugee Health Conference in Currently she is creating the inaugural Indigenous Health Conference: Challenging Health Inequities. She has been studying lower respiratory tract infections for the past 19 years. Her publications among Inuit children have resulted in changes to the Canadian Paediatric Society guidelines for RSV prevention. Dr. Banerji has travelled extensively around the world including work in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Dr. Banerji uses a human rights framework for her work, research and education and is often an advocate for vulnerable populations. She has won several awards including the promising graduate for Harvard School of Public Health in 2003, the U of T Educational Excellence for Community Care Award in 2008 and the Canadian Public Health Association Certificate of Merit in In January 2012, she was inducted into the Order of Ontario. 1 P age

2 Dr. Kevin Pottie Dr. Kevin Pottie is Associate Professor of Family Medicine, and Epidemiology & Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa. He is Co-Chair of the Canadian Collaboration for Immigrant and Refugee Health and Founding Director of the Immigrant Health Clinic of Ottawa where he practices as a family physician. Dr. Pottie is a Principal Scientist at the Institute of Population Health and the C.T Lamont Centre for Primary Care Research at the University of Ottawa. He completed his Medical Doctor degree at Dalhousie University, a Masters in Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, an AMS Senior Education Fellowship: Medical Education in an Age of Pluralism and a Canadian Institutes of Interdisciplinary Health Research Fellowship. His current research program focused on developing evidence based guidelines for primary care practitioners for disadvantaged populations, with a special interest in HIV and Diabetes and migrant populations, and implication of low health literacy on health outcomes and effectiveness. His interest in research to assist disadvantaged populations began as a field doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières in post-war Republic of Georgia. Here, he worked in the Black Sea port of Batumi with the CDC and UNICEF helping to control a large diphtheria epidemic and then later conducted field research documenting poor access to medical care for war-displaced populations. More recently he spent his sabbatical year in the Republic of Congo where he worked with Medecins d Afrique and with Médecins Sans Frontières, this time studying clinical outcomes and program elements related to emerging integrated HIV-AIDS programs in war-affected rural Africa. Dr. Pottie has also worked as a clinician in several other countries including Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Guatemala, Indonesia and Thailand. He is a recipient of the 2005 Commitment to Care Award, and the Ontario PAIRO 2002 Excellence in Clinical Teaching Award. Dr. Pottie maintains an active interest in Global Health and is an appointed member of the College of Family Physicians of Canada s International Health Committee. This committee has focused on bringing concepts of global health equity to a wide audience of family physicians and is currently studying ways to improve global health curriculum in both undergraduate and postgraduate medical training. He is currently helping to develop service learning programs as a vehicle to teach global health and health equity. Dr. Pottie s publication record includes over 60 journal articles, monographs, and book chapters. Many of these have been in the area of immigrant and refugee health and interdisciplinary primary health care, focusing on the delivery care to disadvantaged populations. More recently the focus of his research includes measuring health literacy in migrant populations and HIV prevention and care in disadvantaged and ethnic populations, methods to develop clinical guidelines and service training as a educational method to teach global health to medical students 2 P age

3 and residents. His recent publication in the Canadian Journal of Public Health based on the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada showed evidence linking poor language proficiency with poor health and was covered in the Toronto Star, National CBC Radio and OMNI television. Cultural Consultation: Encountering the Other in Mental Health Care (Springer); the DSM-5 Handbook for the Cultural Formulation Interview (APPI): and Re-Visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience and Global Mental Health (Cambridge) He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Chris Greenaway MD, FRCPC, MSc Associate Professor, McGill University Attending Physician, Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and Research Scientist, Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Community Studies, Jewish General Hospital Staff Physician, JD Maclean Tropical Medicine Centre, McGill University Associate Member Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McGill University address Dr. Chris Greenaway is an attending physician in the Divisions of Infectious Diseases and Laboratory Medicine at the Jewish General Hospital, staff physician at the JD Maclean Tropical Medicine Centre at McGill, a Research Scientist at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Community Studies at the Jewish General Hospital, and Associate Member of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University. Her research is focused on health issues related to immigrants and refugees, measuring the burden of infectious diseases in this population, and designing interventions to decrease their burden. Since 2007, she has been a Steering Committee Member for the Canadian Collaboration on Immigrant and Refugee Health (CCIRH), a national collaboration that includes specialists, primary care practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and immigrant community leaders dedicated to improving the health of immigrants and refugees. They have developed, and recently published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, "Evidence Based Clinical Care Guidelines for Immigrants and Refugees." Dr. Greenaway was the first author on sections of the guidelines pertaining to tuberculosis, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, childhood vaccine preventable diseases, and varicella, and a coauthor on the section on intestinal parasites. She is supported by a Career Award (Clinician-Scientist Junior 2) from the Fond de la research en santé de Quebec (FRSQ). Major Research Activities 3 P age

4 Her major research focus has been on measuring the incidence/prevalence, and associated morbidity and mortality, of infectious diseases in immigrants and refugees after arrival, and designing targeted interventions to decrease this burden. Since coming to the JGH in 2011, she has undertaken observational studies (cross-sectional and large linked cohort studies) to determine the susceptibility to childhood vaccine preventable diseases including varicella, and the rates of morbidity and mortality due to viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, and intestinal parasites in the immigrant population. She is conducting several systematic reviews and meta-analyses on the burden of different infectious disease in the immigrant population and the effectiveness of immigrant tuberculosis screening programs. She has also published a cost-effectiveness analysis to determine the optimal vaccination strategy to decrease the burden varicella has on the immigrant population, and is conducting another on measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR). She has been involved, with the CCIRH, in developing evidence-based clinical care guidelines for newly arrived immigrants that are targeted at primary care practitioners with an objective of improving the health of the immigrant population. She will be involved in an extensive knowledge translation plan for dissemination of these guidelines. Recent Publications Pottie K, Greenaway C, Feightner J, Welch V, Swinkels H, Rashid M, Narasiah L, Kirmayer L, Ueffing E, MacDonald N, Hassan G, McNally C, Kahn K, Burhmann R, Dunn S, Dominic A, McCarthy AE, Gagnon A, Rousseau C, Tugwell P and the Canadian Collaboration for Immigrant and Refugee Health. Review: Evidence-based clinical guidelines for immigrants and refugees. Can Med Assoc. J. Epub 2011 July 15. DOI: /cmaj E1-E7. Greenaway C, Boivin JF, Dongier P, Taperio B, Miller M, Schwartzman K. Susceptibility to Measles, Mumps, Rubella in Newly Arrived Adult Immigrants and Refugees in Montreal, Canada. Annals of Internal Medicine. 2007;146: Merrett P*, Schwartzman K, Rivest P, Greenaway C. Cost- Effectiveness of Various Varicella Vaccination Strategies in Preventing Varicella in New Immigrants. Clinical Infectious Diseases. 2007; 44: P age

5 Dr. Peter B. Polatin _ Peter B. Polatin, MD, MPH, is a Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Global Mental Health at the George Washington University School of Medicine and the senior health advisor for the DIGNITY Institute Against Torture, located in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has prior specialization in community and disaster mental health, pain management, clinical outcomes research, and addictionology. From 2007 to 2010, he functioned as a Health Program Manager for DIGNITY, working with partner NGOs in the developing world to construct, implement, and evaluate psychosocial and medical interventions to assist in the identification, assessment, and treatment of survivors of torture. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Anesthesiology and Pain Management at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and disaster mental health consultant to Dallas County. He helped to coordinate the community mental health response in North Texas for evacuees from Hurricane Katrina in , for which he received several prestigious awards. He has authored, coauthored, or edited over 60 chapters and peer review articles and one book. VIDEO CLIP: Dr. Peter Polatin discusses the psychological implications of Syria's use of chemical weapons (Published on Aug 29, 2013) 5 P age