“It was Exhilarating!”: U of T Students Become Lay Vaccinators
August 24/2022
By Heidi Singer and Françoise Makanda When the first person walked through the door of the makeshift clinic on U of T’s St. George campus, half a dozen students in red polo shirts and purple medical gloves were sitting at long tables, waiting to make history. Akash Kothari, a Master’s...
$3.5 Million Gift to Expand Critical Qualitative Health Research at DLSPH
June 29/2022
A girl stands alone in the middle of an empty desert. A woman looks directly at the viewer, her mouth covered with band-aids. These artworks are helping public health researchers understand more about the lives of young mothers during COVID and systemic barriers that reinforce health inequities. Qualitative research like...
Two Prestigious Awards for DLSPH’s Investigative Journalism Bureau
June 07/2022
By Elaine Smith Within two short years of its launch, the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health has already garnered two prestigious journalism awards and received a nomination for a third. In 2021, the bureau’s inaugural year, it was named a finalist for the...
Strengthening Healthcare Systems in Canada and Around the World
May 20/2022
The new NorthWest International Policy Network will bolster systems of primary care and examine pressing issues in health policy, particularly around pandemics. The University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health is establishing the NorthWest Healthcare Properties REIT International Policy Network at its Institute for Pandemics. Supported by a...
Shelly Bolotin to Head Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases
January 28/2022
By Heidi Singer Shelly Bolotin has been fascinated by infectious disease all her life – first the biology of it, and then the profound way social, economic and other human factors drive its spread. “Viruses are smarter than we are -- that blows my mind,” says DLSPH’s Associate Professor of...
Partnering with Faith Communities to Promote Vaccines — What Works?
December 21/2021
Across Canada, public health officials are trying new partnerships and approaches to encourage vaccine confidence. DLSPH researchers hope to learn whether these efforts help. By Heidi Singer DLSPH researchers are beginning to study how Canadian public health officials and religious leaders are collaborating to build vaccine confidence in communities and...
Return to In-Person Classes Announcement – Winter Term 2022
November 05/2021
Dear DLSPH community, After extensive research and careful consideration of multiple academic and social factors and public health guidance, we have decided to return to in-person courses for the Winter 2022 term. Instructors will determine what in-person means for their Winter course(s) and communicate accordingly to students. For the majority...
Update on Building Access
October 14/2021
Dear DLSPH Community, I would like to share our plans for safely navigating DLSPH buildings during the Fall 2021 Term. As a school of public health, we must be exemplary in our own COVID safety protocols. As such, our newly revised protocols (see attached), developed in consultation with DLSPH’s occupational...
DLSPH-Led Experts Offer Tactics to Catch Up on Routine Immunizations
September 27/2021
By Heidi Singer A DLSPH-led group of experts is calling on governments, physicians, schools and other health providers to step up immunizations for serious diseases like measles and polio to prevent new epidemics from cropping up. The vaccine experts, led by members of DLSPH’s Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases (CVPD),...
Building a Learning Public Health System
August 23/2021Across the country, there are calls to seize on the disruption caused by COVID to create better, stronger health systems – not least to deal with the coming wave of disease that will be diagnosed later due to missed care during the pandemic. This has accelerated interest in intelligent health...