Major moves for mental health, sex and gender work
By Kim Barnhardt
Major moves for two key OSSU research initiatives will help expand the important research and patient engagement work in sex and gender and mental health and addictions in Ontario.
A great place for women’s health
For Dr. Paula Rochon, her move to Sinai Health is a perfect fit. As the lead for OSSU’s sex and gender research, she sees a huge opportunity to grow this important work at a large medical centre in Toronto known for its focus on women’s health and ageing.
“Sinai Health’s focus on women goes back more than 100 years,” said Dr. Rochon, who is the Director of Research at the Weston and O’Born Centre for Mature Women’s Health at Sinai Health and a senior clinician scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI). A geriatrician and the inaugural Barry J. Goldlist Chair in Geriatric Medicine at Sinai Health and the University of Toronto, she has joined one of the largest and respected geriatric medicine programs in Canada, offered in partnership with the University Health Network (UHN). “Sinai Health has provided care for women across life stages, from pregnancy to menopause and beyond.” This is complemented by Sinai Health’s strong expertise in ageing and the world-leading biomedical research at the LTRI.
As women’s health and ageing are strategic priorities for the hospital and major areas for Sinai Health Foundation, “it feels like everyone is rowing in the same direction,” said Dr. Rochon.
She sees a huge opportunity to expand understanding about menopause and beyond, an important but understudied area of women’s health.
“I feel that the area of mature women’s health hasn’t received enough research attention. At menopause, you realize they still have about 1/3 of their lives or beyond,” said Dr. Rochon. “It’s a time when people are thinking about ageing, preventing chronic conditions and it’s an important time for transition.”
She wants to continue building on OSSU’s work in embedding sex, gender, age and their intersections into research into a range of health conditions, which can present differently in women or which affect women disproportionally compared to men. Some conditions such as arthritis, thyroid conditions, and migraines impact women more than men while others like heart disease can present differently in women. Researchers need to look at health conditions with the additional lenses of sex, gender and age to see differences and generate new areas of investigation.
“This goes to the important work OSSU is doing to improve the value of research across the province no matter what we are doing – age, sex and gender should be coming up in whatever researchers are doing. So often when we talk to people who add that additional lens, they see different things, ask questions to explore things further,” said Dr. Rochon.
She wants to embed these concepts as part of the hospital’s work as well as extend to the larger research community and the health ecosystem more broadly, working with external partners to expand and embed these additional determinants of health into research.
“There are so many clinicians and researchers at Sinai Health, and connected to it, that there’s an opportunity to raise the profile about how you incorporate sex, gender and age in research. Just like we do with OSSU, we want to help people think about this when they’re doing their research, and CIHR also requires this so we’ll want to continue doing that.”
She sees opportunity to incorporate sex, gender and age into reporting, service delivery, quality improvement and data analysis to continue to build on this work.
“We’ve worked with OSSU for more than a decade and it’s a wonderful experience to work with them,” said Dr. Rochon. “Vasanthi had the vision early on that we needed to work with women and some of these intersections and across age ranges. She identified this as a priority – maybe before others recognized it was a priority – and has continued to raise awareness. I think this is really important.”
Dr. Rochon and her team at the Centre recently released their 2026-2031 Strategic Research Action Plan. Incorporating sex, gender and age into research are the fundamental underpinnings across their 3 strategic pillars.
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Sex and gender: the key to better patient-oriented research
A new home for mental health and addictions research
The need for mental health and addictions research and health care is increasing in Ontario, and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto is well-equipped to support this growing demand. It is the new home of OSSU’s Mental Health and Addictions Research Initiative, previously spearheaded by Dr. Paul Kurdyak through ICES and now led by Dr. Aristotle Voineskos, Senior Vice President, Research and Science and Director of the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, and his team at CAMH.
The CAMH Research Engagement Initiative, with funding from OSSU, will provide patient and family engagement expertise to researchers and support a network of approximately 600 youth, patients, caregivers and families who are available to support as partners for research projects not just in Toronto but across the province.
As Canada’s largest mental health teaching hospital, CAMH has built a robust infrastructure to support active, meaningful engagement of people with lived experience in research – patients, caregivers and families – that will expand the work of the Early Psychosis Intervention Spreading Evidence-based Treatment (EPI-SET) and NAVIGATE programs, both focused on supporting youth with early psychosis.
Dr. Lina Chiuccariello, Director of Clinical Research, CAMH, is enthusiastic about the next phase of mental health research in Ontario at CAMH.
“We have a network of about 600 people now ready to engage on patient and family partnership projects. We have training for researchers and patient and family advisors to understand what partnership on research projects looks like and provide educational tools on how to do this,” she said. “We are at the stage to build more broadly outside the walls of CAMH thanks to funding from groups like OSSU. It’s an opportunity to leverage what we’ve learned within the hospital and beyond.”
The goal is to be a one-stop shop for mental health and addictions and early psychosis work not only at CAMH but for the province – and potentially across Canada – with patient and family partnership at the core.
In addition to a roster of patient and family partners available to help researchers with mental health and addiction research, the Research Engagement Initiative will expand their scientific committee to review grant proposals with a mental health and addictions component. It will also connect researchers with patient and family partners with lived experience to provide feedback on these proposals. This will help researchers create funding applications aligned with best practices in mental health and addictions research and increase the likelihood of success.
Mentorship and training are also important aspects of the next phase of CAMH’s work.
“We’re developing a mentorship program for trainees and early career researchers to learn early in their careers what it’s like to embed patient and family engagement best practices into their research plans and this could be leveraged for other organizations too,” said Dr. Chiuccariello. “Some understand the importance of early patient and family engagement, and others are eager to learn. People need to learn about engagement as an embedded component of research training, just like they learn statistics. We’re here to support this through knowledge transfer and mentorship of best practices.”
The hope is to leverage this mentorship program with other SPOR-funded entities, such as OSSU Research Centres and SPOR projects in other provinces.
Given we live in highly digital era, the team will develop an eLearning platform to offer training programs on research engagement and other topics for the community, with tailored approaches for specific populations, such as youth, psychosis, and others. This is a priority for the next two years, with the aim to support the broader OSSU network.
“We apply best practices to engage families, caregivers and patient partners but there may be specific considerations, for example, when engaging youth, people in justice system, those experiencing psychosis, or other populations we serve at CAMH,” said Dr. Chiuccariello. “We need to think about these considerations and ensure that we design a safe and open space and design training and education directed at this.”
Since Dr. Chiuccariello started at the hospital, first as a master’s student then as staff, the expansion of its patient engagement work has been significant.
“I was reflective as we recently had our second annual Research Engagement Day at CAMH. When we started, I knew every face in the room, but there were so many new faces, which shows how much the engagement initiative has grown here. I am grateful for the time that people have dedicated to this important work and I’m looking forward to the next stage as we are embedded with OSSU as a mental health priority. We will continue to work to ensure that the voices of people with lived experience of mental health and addictions will be embedded in research broadly and across the OSSU community,” said Dr. Chiuccariello.
Read more articles on mental health research in the OSSU network.
Diverse and mighty teams have huge impact on youth with early psychosis