Service Design in Health Research Webinar

Overview

This webinar will support research teams by exploring some foundational knowledge relating to social determinants of health. The webinar will also cover some principles from the User Design profession to help people consider health systems from a different angle. This session will provide participants with strategies for improving research design and fostering meaningful collaborations with underserved communities, especially diverse and underrepresented groups for shorter projects. All members of the research team are welcome to join.

This is a collaboration between the CIHR Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis (IMHA) and the Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (IHSPR).

Objectives

The specific objectives of the workshop include

  • Identify limitations of current health research approaches to structural and social determinants of health
  • Apply design heuristic techniques and assumption mapping to identify gaps in their research framing and methodology
  • Build trustful relationships with underrepresented communities
  • Engage with critical and reflexive analytical methods as part of a co-design framework

Facilitator

Alex Haagaard

Alex Haagaard is a design strategist living in so-called Kingston, Ontario. Their work specializes in digital accessibility, community engagement, and disability and health justice. They have lived with chronic pain since early childhood and this experience informs their interest in designing and advocating for system-level changes to how healthcare services are conceptualized, planned and delivered. Alex is currently a member of Pain BC's Putting the Pieces Together conference steering committee, and co-chair of the Chronic Pain Network's Knowledge Mobilization and Implementation Science Committee.

Panellists

Michelle Wyndham-West

Michelle Wyndham-West, Ph.D., is the Graduate Program Director of the Design for Health and Inclusive Design programs at OCADU University. Michelle is a critically applied medical anthropologist with graduate degrees in socio-cultural and medical anthropology from the University of Toronto and York University respectively. Michelle teaches in the areas of health policy, medical anthropology, and research methodologies and has received undergraduate and graduate teaching awards from OCAD University. Michelle's research focuses on health equity, gender, public policy systems, and critical co-design methodologies. This research is supported by CIHR, SSHRC, ORF, and EU funding. Additionally, Michelle has published in international journals, including Evidence & Policy, BMJ Open, and Design for Health, and presents research regularly at international conferences, such as at the Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting. Making Gender: Big Pharma, HPV Vaccine Policy, and Women's Ontological Decision-Making is her first book and was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2023.

Diane Finegood

Diane Finegood is a Professor and Fellow in the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. Diane has had a long a varied career including inaugural Scientific Director of CIHR's INMD (2000-2008) and academic work in all four CIHR pillars. She also had the pleasure of teaching in the Semester in Dialogue (2017-2023), a full time intensive undergraduate course of experiential learning. She is currently entering "rewirement" and devoting significant time to improving her Complex Systems Frameworks Collection.

Isabel Jordan

Isabel Jordan draws from her lived experience to provide leadership and guidance in health care and health care research to support meaningful patient partnership practices that are aligned with patient-oriented research.

Isabel was a founding member of the Rare Disease Foundation. Under her leadership, the organization built partnerships between families and researchers through their Research Micro-Grant Program. Isabel is the Strategic Lead in Patient Partnerships in the Chambers Lab at Dalhousie University as well as the Patient Partnership advisor for SKIP, a knowledge mobilization network that seeks to bridge the gap between treatment practices and evidence-based solutions for children's pain in Canadian health institutions.

She is the mother of two disabled young adults living with pain and has drawn on her lived experience in rare disease and disability to become a strong advocate for patient partnership in research. She's been interviewed on CBC radio, written blog posts on patient engagement, co-authored charters with the Patients Included movement, is a member of numerous health research committees, and has spoken at national and international conferences about collaborations between researchers and patients. She has also received the Canadian Organization for Rare Disorders Rarity Award and the Patient Safety & Quality Council Quality Award in Advancing the Patient Voice.

Webinar date

Thursday, April 10th, 2025; 5:00 to 6:00 PM EST

Contact information

For all inquiries, please contact the IMHA Mailbox at: imha-iala@cihr-irsc.gc.ca.

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