 ho has access to primary health care? It’s a hot topic these days and Laura Bissonnette is finding out—using Geographic Information Systems (GIS).A master’s student in geography at UofT Mississauga,Bissonnette is working with professor Kath iWilson,well-known for her studies into the determinants of what makes the citizens of a neighbourhood healthy or unhealthy.
Wilson,Bissonnette and colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan have received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to examine access to general practitioners in private practice and walk-in and community health clinics in the cities of Mississauga and Saskatoon.
“We are interested in all of the aspects of primary health access,”says Bissonnette.“Are there clusters of providers or are they scattered randomly?Are there some areas that are underserviced? Who lives in those areas? Are they people with low incomes? Is public transit available? Are there sidewalks that enable people to walk to health care locations?”
And it is the GIS software that is helping Bissonnette “to drill down to fine points of what we need to create a rich picture of health care availability. It makes problem-solving easier and enables us to go in-depth in our analysis at the neighbourhood level,instead of the usual city or regional levels.”
Within the context of health,GIS technology uses geographic data in the form of maps,databases and models to assist in understanding such things as disease spread and health care services allocation.
The researchers are in the first phase of the project,focused on mapping the physical availability of primary care services using GIS.The second phase will be a cross-sectional telephone survey.
Wilson says it is helpful having students who have the GIS skills.“Is the distribution of health care inequitable in one neighbourhood versus another? It is difficult to answer if you don’t have GIS skills.GIS enables us to identify where an underserved area is.It makes a visual impact.”
Bissonnette says having the ability to use GIS is invaluable to her helping communities.“I hope to continue working in community-based health research where organizations will coordinate research for communities that don’t have access to the technology.With my skills in health geography using GIS,I can be of great help to these organizations.”—Paul Fraumeni
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hat do you get when you cross a painter with a biologist? Meet Michael Corrin,whose latest challenge is creating virtual,interactive,3-D teaching aids for medical residents and fellows.
An artist with an undergraduate science degree,Corrin is a faculty member in the biomedical communications program at UofT and a member of the Perioperative Education Group in the Department of Anesthesia at Toronto General Hospital (TGH).
But he’s more likely to call himself a translator or an interpreter.It’s his job to visualize medical information—information that can be complex and confusing.
Before joining the biomedical communications faculty,Corrin was a master’s student in the program. There he worked as part of an interdisciplinary team on pain visualization funded by the Canadian Institutes of HealthResearch.His animation of tactile allodynia—a condition in which gentle touch can cause extreme pain—was based on medical research.He used animation and sound to convey information about the intricacies of a condition that can be difficult to understand.
Corrin is also part of a group at TGH that builds tools to allow medical students to visualize structures of the heart that they see during a complicated procedure.
Biomedical communications,says Corrin,is a rapidly evolving field.“Originally,medical illustrators were hired to depict anatomy.They sketched from observation with pen and paper. The media we use have changed.So has the scale of things we illustrate. Anatomy is still illustrated but now there’s a whole cellular and sub-cellular world we’re working on.
“But not every drawing is equal.Not every image conveys information equally. There’s a science of information conveyance,of teaching visually.”It’s this challenge that excites Corrin.“I love the opportunity to explore within science,but with new and exciting media.”—Jenny Hall
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