Work in the Spatial Determinants Lab focuses on the study of health inequities in small places and small spaces. Despite decades of universal healthcare for many countries around the world, there still remains pronounced inequities in the social determinants of health, health outcomes, and environmental exposures. These systemic differences are manifest between social groups and across a range of factors such as income, education, and ethnicity. At the same time, health inequities are spatially evident, with differences between countries, regions, communities, and neighbourhoods. Understanding these relationship between social processes, geography, and human health is the focus of our Lab.
Our lab has a large group of scholars working on a diverse range of projects. These projects have a focus on rural and remote health with projects on eHealth, rural youth services, patient and provider perspectives of eHealth interventions, and recruitment and retention programs. Other students are examining high-resource health system users from quantitative and qualitative perspectives, linking health needs to the availability of health services in rural communities, or studies on environmental and occupational epidemiology.
We support scholars at all stages in their academic careers – from undergraduate interns in their first or second years, directed studies projects, and senior honours theses – to graduate students in our Master’s in Health, Science, Technology, and Policy (HSTP), research-based Master’s of Science, and PhD programs. We also have several affiliated scholars from other departments and faculties on campus.
