The Social Organization of Patient Engagement

Fiona Webster is a critical sociologist and Associate Professor in the Labatt Family School of Nursing at Western University and holds a cross appointment with the Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, where she is also an Academic Fellow with the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research (CQ). She has successfully led many Tri-Council funded, interdisciplinary research teams with a particular focus on applying sociological approaches to understanding and improving care, with a particular focus on chronic pain and marginalization. By turning a sociological eye to the challenges of providing chronic pain care within parameters currently delineated by the Canadian health care system, her aim is to identify structural and ideological components of contemporary health care that might be amenable to change.

Eric is a full professor in the Sociology Department at York University. He has been involved in the HIV response for over two decades as an activist, researcher and, in the early years of the epidemic, as a community worker. Eric’s research focuses on the role that various forms of expertise play in governing contemporary health care problems. A recurring focus of his work is the biomedical and broader institutional and discursive response to the HIV epidemic in Canada.

Eric was the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research in the Faculty of Arts, York University, for 2006–2007. In 2014, he received the Dorothy E. Smith Scholar-Activist Award conferred by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In 2015, he received the inaugural Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Award for Distinction in Social Justice Research from York University. In 2017, he received the CAHR-CANFAR Excellence in Research Award for the Social Sciences.

Eric is a Senior Editor of the Canadian Journal of Public Health and a member of the International Advisory Board of Critical Public Health. From 2011–2015, he served as board member of the HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic (Ontario). He has served as a steering committee member of AIDS ACTION NOW! since 2008 and was a founding member of the Ontario Working Group on Criminal Law and HIV Exposure, an organization in which he continues to play an active role. Over the past 10 years he has published widely on the topic of HIV criminalization in Canada.

Dr. Joel Katz is a professor of psychology and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in health psychology at York University in Toronto. He is the research director of the pain research unit in the Department of Anesthesia and pain management at the Toronto General Hospital in addition to serving as a professor in the Department of Anesthesia at the University of Toronto. Dr. Katz received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University. He has held fellowship, scholarship, and scientist awards from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and has been funded as a principal investigator by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and CIHR. He is a former psychologist-in-chief of the University Health Network in Toronto. Dr. Katz is a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Pain Coalition (CPC) and serves as the chair of the CPC Research Committee. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Pain and Pain Research and Management. Dr. Katz’s has published more than 220 articles and book chapters and has been invited to present his work at professional and scientific meetings in North America, Europe and Asia.

Dr. Andrew Pinto is a family physician, director of the Upstream Lab at MAP, and CIHR Applied Public Health Chair in Upstream Prevention in Primary Healthcare.

He is the founder and director of the Upstream Lab at MAP, a space to co-design and rigorously evaluate interventions that tackle the complex social factors that impact our health. Interventions are focused at multiple levels, including individual patients and families, health organizations, neighbourhoods and at the policy process.

Dr. Pinto is a scientist with MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions in the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, and a St. Michael’s Hospital staff physician. He is an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Family and Community Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine, as well as the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. He serves as the Associate Director for Clinical Research of the University of Toronto Practice-Based Research Network (UTOPIAN). He was a Commonwealth Scholar, and a winner of an Early Research Award from the Ontario Government as well as a Clinician-Scientist Award from the University of Toronto. In 2019, he was awarded the PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship.