2004

The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation is pleased to announce that the two people selected as the 2004 Canadian Harkness associates are Jean-Marie Berthelot and Richard Scott. For additional information, please contact Joanne Casey by email or by telephone at (613) 728-2238.

The full Harkness program is administered by the U.S. Commonwealth Fund. This year, Canadian associates of the program will participate in the five major events/meetings involving the Harkness fellows between September 2004 and June 2005.

To arrive at these two finalists, four criteria were used:

Knowledge - knowledge of the Canadian health system; expertise in one of the Commonwealth Fund's and CHSRF's priority areas.

Background - experience as a health-system researcher, decision maker, or journalist; contributions related to researching, managing, or reporting on the Canadian health system.

Potential benefit - extent to which candidate's career will be enhanced or to which the candidate is likely to share the benefits of the experience with Canadian researchers, decision makers or journalists; extent to which the employer commits to support the candidate's Harkness experience

Research and communication/Knowledge Exchange skills - ability to do research, communicate knowledge about health-system issues; quality of the research project or case study on research use; quality of the communication/Knowledge Exchange proposal

Jean-Marie Berthelot

Manager, Statistics Canada, Ottawa

Jean-Marie Berthelot has a background in mathematics (B. Science in Applied Math from the Université du Québec à Rimouski). He has been the manager and senior researcher of the Health Analysis and Measurement Group at Statistics Canada since 2002. He has a track record in conducting policy-relevant research in health economics, population and public health, and health services research in Canada. In addition, Jean-Marie holds an adjunct professorship in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University.

Jean-Marie's current research project is the "Baseline indicators of mortality for monitoring health disparities", which is being launched to address the need to measure health disparities given the commitment from First Ministers in Canada to reduce these disparities. He is also a member of the Task Group on Health Disparities of the Advisory Committee on Population Health and Health Security of the Conference of Deputy Ministers of Health.

Richard Scott

Associate Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary

Richard Scott has a background in biochemistry (PhD from the University of Calgary) and toxicology (Special project associate, Mayo Medical School). He is an associate professor in the Global e-Health Research and Training Program at the University of Calgary. Richard recently gained international experience as a Fulbright New Century Scholar and this redirected his research towards e-health and its global and national importance. The goal of his current research program is to understand the role and impact of e-health in a global and inter-jurisdictional health context by focusing on 1) inter-jurisdictional e-health policy; 2) e-health outcomes; and 3) environmental e-health.

Richard was a founding member of the Canadian Society of Telehealth and is currently Vice-President and President-Elect for the Society, as well as Chairperson of their International Committee.