CIHR Catalyst Grant : Moving Upstream: Structural Determinants of Health – Application
Aboriginal Peoples
Governance and Public Policy
Well-being, Health and Biomedical Discovery
Deadlines
Academic Unit: Inquire with unit
Memorial Deadline: Friday 4th, October 2024
External Deadline: Wednesday 9th, October 2024
Description
Health inequities exist, persist, and are growing in Canada. A 2018 Public Health Agency of Canada report found significant health inequities between the general Canadian population and Indigenous Peoples, sexual and racial minorities, immigrants, and people living with functional limitations, as well as inequities by socioeconomic status. Inequities also exist based on mental health and illness, suicide mortality, and a host of health issues including arthritis, asthma, physical and mental disabilities, oral health, and obesity1.
Social (proximal) determinants of health are conditions under which people are born, grow, live, love, work, and age, and include factors such as education, employment, social support networks, and gender. Structural (distal) determinants of health (StDOH) are defined as the larger societal, economic, ecological, and political contexts which shape these more proximal social determinants and, in turn, population health and well-being.
With renewed attention to racial and health equity in Canada since 2020, health researchers, practitioners, and funders have increasingly recognized the need to examine the root causes of health inequities, along with solutions. Movement is occurring across multiple research areas (e.g. integrated frameworks that explore the social, political, and corporate determinants of rural health equity2), including the identification of future research areas (e.g. the effect of perceived / experienced racial / ethnic discrimination on the health disposition of Canadians3, the promotion of Health In All Policies evaluation approaches – HiAP – during budget deliberations4, and the need to build capacity among practitioners for more widespread adoption of systems approaches5).
There is thus a growing demand for Moving Upstream in population and public health research – past the proximal social determinants of health and the conditions of daily life – towards the structural drivers of health inequities. This research requires a focus on regulations, legislation, policies and institutions and the ways they directly or indirectly impact health (in)equity and health outcomes within and across populations.
The overall purpose of this opportunity is to support robust interdisciplinary research to analyze, contextualize and/or evaluate how structural or “system-level” drivers (e.g., legislation and policies, governance structures, ecological and commercial determinants, etc.) can create, maintain or exacerbate health (in)equity and population health across sub-groups, regions, contexts and settings. These grants are intended to encourage research designs, theories, methods, and approaches to generate evidence on the structural determinants of health and their relationship to health (in)equity. The desired outcome is to contribute to the evidence base in Canada on the structural drivers that improve, sustain, or deteriorate population health and health equity by bringing together health research with other disciplines.
Proposals should focus on the analysis and/or evaluation of StDOH and their effect on health (in)equities. This could be analyzing existing or proposed policies, an analysis of governance processes and structures, or the actions of key actors (e.g. commercial actors, lobbying groups, political actors, etc.) across time and space (e.g. an analysis of COVID-era economic policies and their effect on health inequities, an analysis of Health In All Policies (HiAP) applications and their success or challenges across populations or health issues). Within scope are policy studies at the community (rural and urban), municipal, regional, provincial/territorial, national, and international levels, including comparative analyses across and within Canadian and international jurisdictions.
A broad range of research approaches are eligible, including community-based and participatory research, economic analyses, epidemiological studies, prospective and retrospective policy analyses, population-based cohort studies, comparative studies, and measurement and surveillance studies. Interdisciplinary research is encouraged, such as research from (non-exhaustive list): public health, epidemiology, health systems and services, gender and health studies, economics, political science, mental health, health policy studies, Indigenous health, sociology, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, and more. Original and synthesis research qualify equally.
Proposals must apply an equity-focused lens6 in their research design and/or in the examination of the StDOH impacts in or across specific contexts, settings, and populations (e.g., equity-deserving groups – this includes, but are not limited to, women, persons with disabilities, members of visible minority/racialized groups and members of 2SLGBTQI+ communities).
| Competition | 202410MUD |
|---|---|
| Registration Deadline | 2024-09-11 |
| Application Deadline | 2024-10-09 |
See ResearchNet for more information.