BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN

A unique Laurentian University PhD program in rural and northern health aims to train homegrown health researchers for Northern Ontario.

“The school came to be largely to provide experts in the north who can generate evidence to guide health-care practice,” said Dr. Nancy Young, interim director of the School of Rural and Northern Health.

“You can get lots of evidence on the health of Canadians, and some of that stuff gets broken down into rural and urban, and by province, but nobody really looks into the special characteristics of conditions in northern and rural communities.”

The PhD program, one of six doctorate degrees students can earn at Laurentian, was created in 2006. Representatives of five academic disciplines - medicine, nursing, midwifery, social work and human kinetics - collaborated to set it up.

There are other public health and epidemiology PhD programs in Canada where students can learn to be health researchers, but this is the only one that focuses on rural and northern health, said Young. The interdisciplinary nature of the program is also unique, she said.

Once they earn their doctorate, students can work in a variety of settings - as researchers and faculty at colleges and universities, as researchers at hospitals, public health units or other health-care institutions or as independent consultants, said Young.
She hopes that at least half of her students stay in the north, because their expertise is greatly needed here. However, if they do find jobs in southern Ontario or elsewhere, it would increase the profile of the program outside of Northern Ontario, Young said.

Eight students are currently at various stages in the program. Their thesis projects include examinations of how adults with serious mental illness re-enter the workplace and the impact on children with cancer having to travel to hospitals outside their community for care.

“Thesis projects have to be something that have a practical implication. They also have to expand our theoretical knowledge in an area. If we just find out how many people have cardiovascular disease in Timmins, that’s not enough to be a PhD,” said Young.

“If it actually taught us how the roots of cardiovascular disease are different in people who live in Timmins, that is something that would expand our general understanding and make a better project.”

Doctorate degrees take about four years to complete. The first one or two years of the program are spent taking two core courses: one that gives them an overview of health issues in Northern Ontario, and one that offers them a good knowledge of statistical analysis.

At the end of these courses, the students write three papers based on questions posed by faculty, and orally defend their papers. They also come up with a proposal for their thesis, and orally defend the merit of the potential project.

“As supervisors, we’ll say ‘In your proposal, you said you were doing this research because there’s a higher rate of mental illness in Northern Ontario, and you want to look at whether it’s because of schizophrenia. Why not epilepsy?’” Young said.

“The student will say ‘Well, there’s a good reason. There was such and such a paper that said schizophrenia is a growing concern in the north, and we have a lack of services for that population.’

“We don’t want them to spend two years doing their research, get to their defense, and have somebody say ‘It was fatally flawed from the get-go. Schizophrenia is not an issue in the north. Why did you waste your time?’ That’s why we ask them to defend their proposal.”

While doing their research, the students will have access to expert faculty to help them navigate any difficulties they may encounter, she said.

“PhD students do some of the most innovative and scientifically rigorous work done.

When you’re not a student, there are very few opportunities where somebody has a research project, and has 100 per cent buy-in from all of the people that they need to collaborate in that research,” Young said.

“When I do a project as a professor, I will get three or four different people with expertise to help me. They may come to a meeting once a month or do some work for me. But with PhD students, their co-supervisors are really on the hook and are very actively involved.”

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