“For years and years there was very little medical research that had women as subjects,” observes Maclean. “So I’m very driven to help address this equity issue.”

To that end, Maclean and her colleagues forged a partnership between the University of Toronto and Women’s College Hospital (now Sunnybrook & Women’s College Health Sciences Centre) to create an innovative centre that would both foster research collaboration and tell the women’s health story to the world. In 1995, the Centre for Research in Women’s Health (CRWH) opened its doors, creating an unprecedented resource for women’s health research.

The CRWH motto is “leadership through partnership,” which signals its crusade to create a critical mass of researchers, health care professionals and community groups working to address a range of women’s health issues. “The need for collaboration is absolutely critical,” says Maclean, CRWH’s founding director. “There just aren’t enough of us working together.”

With well over 250 partners – including universities, hospitals and health centres, funding agencies, governments, corporations, and community-based, national and international organizations from across Canada and around the world – CRWH is living up to its motto.

CRWH engages in a variety of initiatives, from fundraising, promotion and research dissemination to nuts-and-bolts projects like helping medical practitioners set up clinical trials.

Under Maclean’s guidance, CRWH has received international recognition for its strides in improving women’s health. It has the unique honour of being a Pan America Health Organization/World Health OrganizationCollaborating Centre in Women’s Health for the Western Hemisphere.

Focusing on issues like women’s mental health, violence, cancers common in women, gender differences in pharmacology and reproductive health, CRWH brings together faculty across a range of disciplines, including various medical specialities, genetics, pharmacology, sociology, behavioural psychology, epidemiology, public health sciences, legal studies and community education.

Last year, CRWH organized a graduate student research day that brought together students from diverse disciplines such as medicine, women’s studies and social work to identify common links in their research. “We had an incredible response,” recalls Maclean. “So many of these students thought they were working in isolation and were thrilled to discover other students at the university with similar research interests.”

“There are a lot of unique elements to CRWH that make it different from your traditional research centre,” observes Maclean. A series of chair-painting workshops is an example of that innovation.

“One of our grassroots fundraising initiatives involved designing and auctioning off chairs to help establish the Shirley A. Brown Memorial Chair in Women’s Mental Health,” recalls Maclean. Scores of people – “everyone from eight-year-old kids to professional artists” – met on weekends over the course of a year to paint and decorate chairs. Maclean herself painted four chairs. Then they auctioned off 125 chairs, raising about $125,000.
Maclean’s interest in women’s health has a long history. Originally a dietician, she found her way back into academia through a master’s degree in community nutrition at U of T, followed by a doctorate in education at U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. This led to a faculty position in the department of nutritional sciences at the Faculty of Medicine.

A former chair of that department, Maclean still has a primary appointment there. While her schedule doesn’t allow for teaching at the moment, she still supervises a handful of graduate students. “The opportunity to have graduate students is wonderful – that’s how you learn. They’re smart, they’re curious, they dig into new areas – it’s a wonderful partnership.”

Amid this flurry of activity, Maclean manages to carve out some time for research of her own. One project aims to promote self-care among women – encouraging women to be proactive about their own health by, for instance, having a good diet, exercising and doing breast self-exams.

Sponsored by Kellogg Canada, the initiative started out as an extensive literature review. “We decided that the final document would be incomprehensible to most people,” recalls Maclean, “so we conducted a pilot course with health care professionals to test our ideas and get their help with user-friendly ways to present these ideas.”

Maclean and her team conducted about nine classes for professionals such as occupational therapists, physical therapists, dieticians and social workers to “provide them with new ways of thinking about their clinical practice” while using their experiences to build on the research. Maclean invited a graphic artist to sit in on the sessions and translate the results into a kind of workbook – which looks a bit like a comic strip – to make the research accessible to other practitioners. “Ultimately, we want to help health care professionals change the way in which they work.”

Another project – which keeps Maclean busy on weekends studying Spanish “in a very intensive way” and takes her to Costa Rica twice a year – involves helping the University of Costa Rica develop and deliver gender-sensitive anti-violence training within academic and clinical institutions in order to prevent violence against women. The goal of this five-year project, which is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, is to build a critical mass of professionals in the health, education and justice sectors who are sensitive to this issue and equipped to address the problem.

Maclean’s passion for her work – evidenced by the enthusiastic smiles that burst across her face as she talks about CRWH – is driven, she says, by the need for it. “There’s a huge need to generate more knowledge on the health of women, and doing that requires major system changes,” she insists. “And this is just the beginning – we’ve made huge strides, but there’s so far to go.”

Staff at CRWH and Sunnybrook & Women’s work tirelessly to spread the word about the importance of women’s health research. Initiatives include:

• The “Leadership Through Partnership” bi-annual newsletter and annual report, which keep key stakeholders informed about the work at CRWH.
  
• A Web site – www.womenshealthmatters.ca – to make women’s health information as accessible as possible for Canadian women. This year the site launched an online women’s health community, “Le Club,” which features
  discussion groups, special events, and monthly “Ask the Expert” panels where women can get feedback directly from women’s health experts at Sunnybrook & Women’s.
  
• The Women’s Health Matters Forum & Expo, an annual two-day interactive consumer and health provider event. Women and men of all ages have the opportunity to attend interactive presentations, speak personally with top health experts, and visit over 130 exhibits demonstrating services, products and information on women’s health.

These initiatives serve a dual function, says Maclean. “They inform users of our work and are wonderful educational vehicles, and they promote the brand name of CRWH. Brand awareness and creating public recognition of CRWH and what it stands for is crucial.”

For more information about research initiatives and partnerships at CRWH, visit www.crwh.org