Congratulations to our PhD student Bronte Johnston who was awarded the 2023 Graduate and Fellowship Research Award in Women’s Health! This competition was supported thanks to the dedicated funding provided by the BC Ministry of Health in partnership with the BC Women’s Health Foundation.
The Women’s Health Research Institute (WHRI) launched this award in 2020 with a goal of creating a funding opportunity specific to WHRI’s outstanding trainee community. This award provides salary support to WHRI-affiliated graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who are engaged in women’s and/or newborn health research under the mentorship of a WHRI member.
With the supervision of Dr. Patricia Janssen (Professor of UBC School of Population and Public Health) and Dr. Kate Shannon (Professor of UBC Department of Medicine), Johnston is engaged in her research project – “Moving Towards Equitable and Accessible Contraception Care: Describing the Unmet Contraception Needs of Rural Vancouver Island Youth aged 15-29 through Community Research.”
The BC government now provides free contraceptives throughout the province. It is essential to know how this health policy change impact youths’ unmet contraception needs in order to understand the actions that need to be taken to improve contraception equity. Johnston’s project seeks to investigate the unmet contraception needs of youth and understand intersecting social and structural factors that shape sexual health access through community research in rural and urban-rural areas of Vancouver Island. This project will outline youth unmet contraception needs to inform how safe and more equitable contraception care can be provided. *An unmet contraception need is inaccessibility of required methods/care. E.g., youth require an intrauterine device, but no practitioner can perform the insertion; their contraception need is unmet.
Read the announcement by WHRI.