That interest has taken her as far afield as Uganda - where, for her PhD work - she evaluated how martial arts could impact the lives of self-identified women and girls for the better.

“Since then, I've always been focused on unpacking and teasing apart how gender-based violence can be addressed, reduced and prevented through interventions that are part of the ‘sport for development and peace’ umbrella,” says Hayhurst.

       
Today, that work includes a principal investigator role with the Wheels of Change project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), which studies how access to bicycles can help address poverty, gender equity and sustainability for self-identified girls and women in Nicaragua, Uganda, and Canada, using a trauma-informed approach. It’s work that began in 2016, now funded through to 2026. 

Hayhurst argues mobility may play a significant role in gender-based violence prevention, and points to bicycling in Nicaragua to help explain why.

“If you can't move, if you can't escape, if you can't access employment opportunities and education, those are the structural factors that the bicycle can help solve.” 

“The young women in Nicaragua were able to go to school during the pandemic because they had bicycles and could avoid virus exposure on public transit. They were also able to sell goods on their bikes and to access health services that they otherwise wouldn’t have.”

Over the next three years, Hayhurst - who is also a York Research Chair in Sport, Gender and Development and Digital Participatory Research - is hoping to gain more insight into how to address some of the social issues that affect the study participants. 

“In rural Uganda, there are a lot of stigmas and myths around young women ridingbicycles – particularly in more remote communities. So they often don’t want to be seen riding them.” 

“At the same time, they want to be visible for safety reasons. There’s a paradox, and we think trauma- and violence-informed approaches to cycling and bicycle-focused development programs can possibly help address some of these issues.”

Some of those approaches include training staff on the health effects of trauma and violence, creating emotionally and physical safe spaces and peer support for program participants, fostering choice for participants to pick their own physical activities, and building on participants’ strengths, rather than deficit thinking. 

These are some of the key principles of trauma-and violence-informed physical activity, a concept Hayhurst is further investigating with self-identified women in communities throughout Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver for a project about preventing and addressing family violence. Hayhurst is co-principal investigator, alongside principal investigator Francine Darroch at Carleton University, with funds from the Public Health Agency of Canada.

As a mother of four active young kids, Hayhurst says she’s also hopeful her work will help contribute to the current national discourse about youth sports, like hockey. 

“With all that's happening right now in the Canadian context around safe sport, I'm certainly questioning a lot of the purported benefits and thinking a bit more critically around what can be done to make it safer,” she says. “I do feel like there are sports, like Ultimate Frisbee, dragon boating or pickleball, that have tried to move deliberately away from a neo-liberal, competitive, individualistic model.”

“There's hope in using a trauma and violence-informed approach in sports development that is more community-focused and inclusive.”

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This one kills over a million people a year – and by 2050, the death toll could be as high as 10 million annually. 

Ironically, this pandemic is caused by something good – antimicrobial medicines, like penicillin. 

But don’t blame the drugs. The problem – the growing number of infections becoming resistant to the drugs we use to treat them – comes from our overuse of the very medicine that is there to heal us.

“For decades we have overused antimicrobial drugs in humans and animals which has sped the natural process of resistance development in microbes,” says Dr. Susan Rogers Van Katwyk, managing director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance at �첥��Ƶ. 

"By overusing antimicrobials, we've stepped on the gas and we're pushing the whole system forward at a much faster rate than would occur naturally."

Antibiotics are a product of nature, notes Rogers Van Katwyk, an epidemiologist. Long before humans learned to create drugs that can kill bacterial infections like pneumonia and tuberculosis, plants learned to emit chemicals that would destroy the pathogens trying to harm them. 

Later, ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, Serbia and Greece healed wounds by applying moldy bread.

But the antibiotic revolution really got going only fairly recently. In 1908, German scientist Paul Erlich collaborated with others to create an antibiotic to treat syphilis. Then, in 1928, came the famous accidental discovery by Scottish physician Alexander Fleming. He returned to his lab after a holiday and saw that petri dishes containing staphylococcus bacteria had been halted by mold containing a substance called penicillin notatum. 

Since then, antimicrobials have revolutionized health care and led to significantly longer lifespans.“ In the past 30 years, globally, maternal and child health have improved significantly. Deaths have gone way down. And that’s just one example,” says Steven Hoffman, Dahdaleh Distinguished Chair in Global Governance and Legal Epidemiology and a professor of global health, law and political science at York. 

Drug resistance occurs because bacteria and viruses evolve quickly, as we’ve seen with the COVID pandemic and all of its many variants.  With a bacterial infection such as pneumonia, an antibiotic will kill most of the bacteria and your immune system will take care of the rest. 

“But when you use antibiotics as widely as we do and over a long period of time, bacteria develop mechanisms to survive,” says Rogers Van Katwyk.  “Different species of bacteria can share genetic codes for resistance. These genes are like the cheat code for how the bacteria can avoid an antibiotic.” 

At one time, antibiotics such as penicillin took care of pneumonia easily, but Hoffman says that overuse has created new strains of resistant pneumonia that are often fatal. Then there are the ultra-dangerous infections like MRSA and C-DIFF and a form of tuberculosis that are extremely resistant to antibiotics. 

And this overuse is happening in many sectors. Hoffman points to U.S. statistics that show that only 10 per cent of patients who seek treatment for a sore throat will need an antibiotic. But at least 50 per cent of them will leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for an antibiotic. Rogers Van Katwyk says the same is happening in the food industry, where “antibiotics are widely used in meat-producing animals to make them grow faster” and antimicrobial agents are overused on crops further contributing to drug resistance. 

“We’re not saying we should all stop using antimicrobials,” says Hoffman. “We’re saying we must use them when they are necessary, keeping in mind their impacts on human health, animal health, and the environment.”

They believe progress can be made through evidence-based research and capacity building to support the development of better policies. To that end, the Wellcome Trust has awarded Hoffman and Rogers van Katwyk $8.7M to launch what they call a Policy Accelerator. 

“Many countries are rewriting their national plans on drug resistance, and this is one area where our evidence-based policy research can support effective policymaking. We’re going to work with governments to help solve the challenges they’re facing,” says Rogers Van Katwyk. 

"We’re forming a team that will apply the science and expertise we have as a research group at York and a WHO Collaborating Centre and we’ll tailor our work to each country, because what works in Canada will be different from what works in Nigeria.”

Hoffman likens their upcoming work to a consulting role where “we will have a razor-sharp focus on impact for people around the world. Our goal is not to do what we normally do as academics and publish papers. Our success will be measured in policy changes and lives saved. This is an amazing opportunity.”

The post The next pandemic appeared first on Ascend Magazine.

While many hospitals are well equipped to deal with day-to-day emergencies, few were prepared for the disruptive changes that led to provincewide shutdowns, mask-wearing, cancellation of surgeries and medical procedures, staff shortages, and an ensuing confusion about what they were dealing with and for how long.

Looking back at some of the impossible decisions that hospitals were forced to make, two professors from the Schulich School of Business – Raha Imanirad and Adam Diamant – want to evaluate the relative performance of hospitals prior to and after the pandemic. They hope to uncover new insights that will inform and help optimize hospital operations for future pandemics and crises.

“There are certain processes now that are different than before the pandemic – the use of masks, and the prioritization of certain patient populations over others,” says Imanirad. 

“These are the management-level decisions that affect patient care.” A graduate of Harvard Business School, Imanirad joined York in 2020. She teaches operations management and her research specializes in health care operations.

“Our research will address which populations of patients were prioritized, which procedures took precedence over others, and whether the processes put in place to ensure the safety of practitioners and hospital staff affected hospital performance and the ability to deliver care,” says Diamant, who teaches operations management and information systems. Diamant’s research focuses on AI, business analytics and operations management in the health industry.

“The research will tease out the departmental- and organizational-level decisions made during the pandemic and how those decisions affected various hospitals in terms of health care delivery,” he adds.

The project will combine causal methods and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the clinical capabilities of hospitals before and after COVID-19. The team will access a rich data set provided by the General Medicine Inpatient Initiative (GEMINI), a big data collaborative that helps physicians, health care teams and hospitals unify and examine clinical data. GEMINI contains a data repository collected from more than 30 large hospitals in Ontario. 

The research will use both clinical and operational data to create a classification system that identifies and scores high- and low-performing hospitals on their ability to efficiently and effectively deliver care. The performance scores will then help to determine how each hospital’s relative performance ranking was altered due to COVID-19. It will also generate evidence about all adult medical and intensive care hospitalizations during the pandemic and identify marginalized, high-risk and underrepresented populations that were impacted.

The DEA methodology will allow the research team to incorporate multiple metrics that relate to hospital performance, including input-based metrics such as the cost of admission per patient, and output-based metrics such as 30-day re-admission and mortality rates.

“There are many factors at play, including leadership, culture and networks,” says Imanirad.

"This project will measure how successful hospitals were in collaborating and utilizing resources."

“Our findings will help hospitals improve their preparedness for future pandemics and health emergencies, and to promote a more equitable approach to health care.”

“COVID was and still is an extraordinary time for many organizations,” says Diamant. “Hospitals did their best to make good managerial decisions with very limited information. Now is the right time to step back and learn about the ramifications of some of those decisions, to better prepare for the future.”

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