Julia Pemberton, PhD candidate
Health Research Methodology Program, Field of Interest: Global Health pemberj@mcmaster.ca
This past summer I had the incredible opportunity to join the World Health Organization (WHO) as a Research Intern for three months. At WHO I joined the Global Health Ethics Unit, which is part of the larger Research, Ethics, Knowledge Management Department. The majority of my internship focused on the creation and execution of a qualitative descriptive research study. Entitled “Ethical Issues Associated with Implementation Research: A Descriptive Qualitative Analysis of the WHO Experience from 2005-2015,” this study consists of a document analysis followed by two focus group sessions, one with WHO Technical Officers, and one with past and present WHO Ethics Research Committee (ERC) members. The purpose of this study is to identify and understand the ethical issues identified by the WHO ERC in its review of Implementation Research (IR) projects submitted for ethical review at WHO. The results from this study will be used to raise awareness on the ethical issues arising in IR and to build capacity of researchers and ethics committees involved in the conduct and review of IR, respectively. The results will also potentially be used to inform a global guidance document on ethical review of IR. In addition to this research project I also was a member of the WHO Intern Board as an Intern Advocate, where I helped connect interns with WHO staff to engage in professional development and networking opportunities. Finally, I was also responsible for the creation of an Intern Alumni platform for the Global Health Ethics Unit, as well as the Global Health Ethics newsletter. In summary, I used my time in Geneva to expand my professional network, and had productive meetings with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins sans frontières, the Council on Health Research and Development (COHRED), and the Geneva Centre for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action (CERAH).
The research activities described above directly relate to my doctoral work. The topic of my dissertation is global health research governance. Governance, or the way political, ethical, administrative, and financial authority applies to a health research system, is an important part
of how these systems are organized and managed, and how they perform. The purpose of my doctoral thesis is to examine how global health research governance is being understood, developed and currently used in the Canadian national health research system. Briefly, my thesis will generate an inductively derived, reflexive, global health research governance model for Canada. Through this work I intend to identify specific value criteria that are indicative of good global health research governance. Foregrounded will be the contribution of global health research ethics to governance beyond research ethics review, and discerning how values are known and reflected in the governance of national health research systems. Once this model of Canadian global health research governance is known, I will be conducting a case study of a global health research partnership (Canada and Zambia) to determine the current reflexivity of the Canadian model and determine what, if any, recommendations for policy and health systems strengthening could be made.
Julia Pemberton is a 3rd year student in the Health Research Methodology PhD at McMaster University, a CIHR Banting & Best Canadian Graduate Scholar, and a recipient of both the CIHR Douglas Kinsella Award in Bioethics and the CIHR Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement Award.
Humanitarian Health Ethics 