CCHE Seminar: The Impact of Societal Conditions on Health: Reflections on the State of the Evidence

Arjumand Siddiqi
University of Toronto

Friday, February 8th, 2019, 12:15 – 2:15 PM, HS 108 (155 College Street)

Abstract: As research on the impact of societal conditions on health has evolved, there has been a push to move from the general to the specific, for example, to move from characterizing health status associated with various welfare regimes, to evaluating the health effects of specific social policies. This lecture will provide an overview of this transition and will discuss some of the progress it has permitted, as well as some of the tensions that it has introduced.

Arjumand Siddiqi is Canada Research Chair in Population Health Equity and Associate Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, where she also holds appointments in the Department of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine and the Hospital For Sick Children, as well as at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Siddiqi is interested in understanding how societal conditions produce and resolve inequities in population health and human development across the lifespan. Her research focuses primarily on the roles of resource inequities and social policies, the methods and metrics that enable scientific inquiry on health inequities, and mechanisms related to public and political uptake of evidence. Dr. Siddiqi is an alumnus of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Global Academy and former Associate Member of its Program on Successful Societies. She was also a member of the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health Knowledge Hub on Early Child Development, and has consulted to several international agencies including the World Bank and UNICEF. Dr. Siddiqi received her doctorate in Social Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health.