Morocco-Canada Network in Maternal and Infant Health
Morocco-Canada Network in Maternal and Infant Health
Professor Amster created this network with funding support from the Global Public Health Program of the Canadian Institute for Health Research, and from Associated Medical Services
What is the research about?
This interdisciplinary research group of 18 Canadian and Moroccan doctors, social scientists, nurses, NGO leaders, and community members came together to examine the challenges for mothers and infants in Morocco.
We suggest that to reach equity for women in under-resourced settings, health systems should develop collaborative interventions with community partners and incorporate interdisciplinary methodologies in order to see barriers to care and to hear the voices and preferences of women.
What did the researcher do?
With a CIHR Population Health Global Health Grant (20K) and AMS research support (50K), Dr. Amster brought McMaster colleagues from Family Medicine, Midwifery, Pediatrics, and Social Science to Morocco for an intensive seven-day research meeting of 18 colleagues, October 20-27, 2018 in Rabat, the remote High Atlas village cluster Zawiya Ahansal, and in Marrakesh.
Moroccan colleagues described the determinants of women’s health in Morocco, Muslim women’s rights, maternal morbidity and mortality, the work of local NGOs, the Moroccan healthcare system, and professional challenges for midwives, physicians, nurses, and scientists. Canadians shared models of intervention from Canadian and global contexts.
Dr. Amster recently published a scoping review describing the field of maternal and infant health for the network, Mapping maternal and infant health in Morocco: A global scoping review of themes, gaps, and the “unseen” in the published health research literature, 2000–2022 in PLOS Global Public Health. It summarizes the field in 34 themes and also contains a thematic bibliography.
Researcher
Ellen Amster
PhD
Associate Professor, Religious Studies
Associate Professor, Family Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences
Adjunct & Associate Member, Anthropology
Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine
Member, McMaster Institute for Research on Aging (MIRA), McMaster University
Associate Member, Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, Faculty of Health Sciences