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Message from the Chair
Welcome to the Department of Global and Public Health (DGPH) in the School of Population and Global Health at 苹果淫院! I am honored and excited to serve as the inaugural chair of this new Department.
As one of three departments in the School of Population and Global Health, DGPH aims to address health inequities and advance public health through action-oriented research, interdisciplinary training, allyship and equitable partnerships. This Department includes Global Health Programs (GHP) as a core program.
We are living in an era of polycrisis, where multiple challenges are affecting the world simultaneously 鈥� from pandemics, conflicts, climate crises to inflation, misinformation, and collapse of public health services. The Covid-19 pandemic alone has had a devastating impact on our progress to achieving the Sustainable Development Goal. Record temperatures and extreme weather events around the world remind us that that pathogens and pollutants respect no borders or walls.
No country can solve polycrisis on its own; we are in an era of inevitable interdependence, and will need to understand complex, inter-connected systems, and go well beyond healthcare sectors. Global solidarity and global citizenship are not mere buzzwords 鈥� they are critical for our collective survival.
We cannot tackle polycrisis without addressing inequities, within our own country, and globally. Whether it is widening economic inequality, pandemics, wars or climate crises, it is always the poorest and the marginalized communities who pay the price.
As powerful and privileged people and as academics in a high-income country in the Global North, we have a huge responsibility, an obligation, to use our power and privilege, as allies, to address the deeply entrenched inequities and power differentials within our field of global public health. Allyship, shifting power and fighting for social justice, human rights, and equity, are at the heart of global public health.
Global health must include local. Typically, global health programs in high-income countries (HICs) focus on inequities between HICs and LMICs. But many HICs handled Covid-19 poorly, and the inequities within HICs were exposed. So, global & public health education must teach students to address health disparities wherever they occur to avoid reinforcing a sense of the 鈥榦ther鈥�. Within Canada, we have a lot of work to do to address health inequities and disparities that impact Indigenous communities, immigrants, and refugees.
While polycrises are overwhelming and anxiety-provoking, we do not have the luxury of giving up hope. 鈥淗ope is something you have to earn,鈥� said Greta Thunberg in her听Climate Book. Hope comes from taking action. We must rise to the biggest challenges of our day, and work together, to do the best we can to address polycrisis, in solidarity with the most impacted communities, nationally and globally.
My hope for DGPH is to become the most comprehensive and impactful global public health program in Canada and among the best in the world. More importantly, I hope we can make a serious contribution to making a change. We cannot sit by and just study or document problems during an era of polycrises. We must act to prevent and solve them. Our future depends on it.