The Coordinating Committee, made up of the project’s principal investigator and two theme leaders from each of the four project themes – Approaches to Care, Work Organization, Accountability and Financing and Ownership – set out the project’s overall intellectual direction.
The team brought together not only academic researchers from a variety of social science and humanities disciplines and universities but also researchers with considerable policy experience and health professionals who not only do research but also provide care, with organizations representing workers, employers, seniors and families.
Principal Investigator
Dr. Pat Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto. She held a CHSRF/CIHR Chair in Health Services and Nursing Research, and has published on a wide variety of issues related to long-term care, health care policy, and women’s health. Edited books include A Place to Call Home: Long Term Care in Canada, and Women’s health: Intersections of Policy, Research and Practice.
Co-investigators
Dr. Annmarie Adams is the Chair of the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Her primary areas of research interest include gender, sexuality and space, long-term care institutions, history of hospital architecture and vernacular architecture. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Hugh Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor and Professor Emeritus of Social Work and Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Dr. Armstrong’s major research interests include long-term care, the political economy of healthcare, unions and public policy, the organization of work and family and household structures. Theme group: Accountability
Dr. Donna Baines is currently the Director and a Professor of Social Work, University of British Columbia (formerly the Chair in Social Work at the University of Sydney, Australia). Her current areas of research interest include restructuring in social and care services, paid and unpaid care work, and anti-oppressive social work theory and practice. Theme group: Financing & Ownership
Susan Braedley (MSW, Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and the Department of Health Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Dr. Braedley’s research program focuses on aging, care work, health and equity. She is Co-investigator on many funded research projects, including “Imagining Age-Friendly ‘Communities within Communities:’ International Promising Practices”. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Paul Leduc Browne is the Director of the Department of Social Sciences at Université du Québec en Outaouais in Gatineau, Quebec. Dr. Leduc Browne’s areas of research interest include political thought, public policy, social policy and health, social economy, and ideologies and social movements. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Sally Chivers is a Professor in the Departments of Canadian Studies and English at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. The author of From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives (2003) and The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in the Cinema (2011), and the co-editor of The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film (2010), Dr. Chivers maintains a research focus on the relationship between aging and disability in the Canadian public sphere and beyond from an interdisciplinary perspective. Committed to old age as a vital category of analysis, she has published a number of essays on disability and aging in film and television, as well as pieces on aging in auto/biography, the Canadian disability movement, disability in the Canadian public sphere, the image of the wounded warrior, and long term care in the cultural imagination. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Jacqueline A. Choiniere is an Associate Professor with the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Dr. Choiniere’s primary areas of research include health policy, women’s work and health, health-care reform, and accountability and political economy. Theme group: Accountability
Dr. Tamara J. Daly is a Professor with the School of Health Policy & Management, Faculty of Health, York University in Toronto, and Director of the York University Centre for Aging Research and Education. Her research focuses on health care work, aging and long-term care policy, and gender and health policy. Theme group: Work Organization
Dr. Megan Davies is an Associate Professor with the Department of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies at York University in Toronto. Dr. Davies’ research interests include health history, old age, British Columbia history, women and health and midwifery and alternative births. For additional information, visit her profile. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Malcolm Doupe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Dr. Doupe is also a Senior Research Scientist at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy. He conducts research on issues related to care continuity for older adults, factors that affect quality care and functional status in nursing homes, risk factors of home care and nursing home uses, and health service utilization. Theme group: Work Organization
Dr. Monika Goldmann was a Senior Researcher and Consultant at Sozialforschungsstelle in Dortmund, Germany. Her fields of research interest include a sociological focus on gender equality in employment, gender and diversity policy, and demographic change. She also conducts empirical research in the fields of human resources policy and organizational developments. Theme group: Work Organization
Dr. Charlene Harrington is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Nursing with the Department of Social & Behavioral Science at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Her major research interests include nursing home care (quality access, and utilization), home and community based care, and personal care services. Theme group: Financing & Ownership
Dr. Frode F. Jacobsen is a Professor in Elderly Care at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (formerly Bergen University College), Norway, and research director at the Centre for Care Research – Western Norway. Dr. Jacobsen is also a part-time professor at Betanien University College of Nurses in Bergen. His research interests include elderly care, health professionals, work culture, local knowledge systems and social and cultural aspects of health and sickness. Theme group: Work Organization
Dr. Robert James was a Family Doctor for 35 years, and a Medical Director at Wentworth Lodge, a not-for-profit long-term care facility in Dundas, Ontario, for 14 years. He retired in September, 2011, but continued to contribute to the MRCI project. He has a keen interest in making long-term care better and contributes his practical on-the-ground experience for the benefit of the project. Theme group: Accountability
Dr. Monique Lanoix is an Associate Professor of Public Ethics and Philosophy at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. Dr. Lanoix’s areas of research interest include political philosophy, feminist philosophy and medical ethics. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Joel Lexchinis a Professor Emeritus of Health Policy in the School of Health Policy & Management, 
Faculty of Health at York University in Toronto. Dr. Lexchin also works as a doctor in the emergency department at the University Health Network. His research interests include physician prescribing behavior, pharmaceutical promotion, drug approval process and access to medications in the developing world. Theme group: Financing & Ownership
Dr. Liz Lloyd is a Professor and Senior Research Fellow, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Dr. Lloyd’s research interests are in ageing, health and care. Her recent research has focused on dignity in later life, including in older people’s experiences of care systems and unpaid family support. She has a long-standing interest in the end of life in old age and the relationship between human rights and dependency. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Martha MacDonald is a Professor of Economics with the Department of Economics at the Sobey School of Business at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Dr. MacDonald is also currently involved with the Women’s Studies and Atlantic Canada Studies programs. Her areas of specialization include economic restructuring, gender and the economy, social security policy and restructuring in rural Atlantic Canada. Theme group: Financing & Ownership
Dr. Margaret McGregor MD, MHSc is a Clinical Associate Professor with the University of British Columbia (UBC), Department of Family Practice and a research associate with the UBC Centre for Health Services Policy Research and the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute’s Centre for Clinical Epidemiology & Evaluation. She is a family physician at the Mid Main Community Health Centre in Vancouver, where as part of her practice, she provides care to patients in residential long-term care. She has completed a number of research projects in the area of nursing home health services delivery. Her research has included investigating staffing levels, hospitalization rates and site of death at long-term care facilities, and facility ownership and organizational characteristics. Theme group: Accountability
Dr. Kathryn McPherson is a Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies with the School of Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto. Dr. McPherson’s areas of research interest include nursing history, women and health, gender and colonialism in the Canadian West and rural women. Theme group: Financing & Ownership
Professor Allyson Pollock is a doctor who is a consultant in public health medicine and was formerly the Director of the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University. Her research interests include globalization, privatization, health services, regulation, pharmaceuticals and clinical trials. She has coauthored two books on the NHS, including NHS Plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care, published by Verso. For additional information, visit her website. Theme group: Financing & Ownership
Dr. James Struthers is a Professor Emeritus in Canadian Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Dr. Struthers is also a member of the Trent Centre for Aging and Society. His research interests include aging and long term care policy, growth and regulation of private and public nursing homes, evolution of home care policies, modern Canadian social welfare history and veterans and Canadian social policy. Theme group: Work Organization
Dr. Marta Szebehely is a Professor Emeritus of Social Work with the Department of Social Work at Stockholm University in Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Szebehely’s research interests include gender, social policy and care, everyday life perspectives on home-based and residential care, and living conditions and use of care among elderly and disabled people. Theme group: Financing & Ownership
Dr. Hildegard Theobald Professor of Organizational Gerontology at the University of Vechta in northwestern Germany. Dr. Theobald skills and expertise include gender studies, qualitative analysis, international comparative research in social care, political sociology, professionalism and intersectionality. Theme group: Work Organization
Dr. Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau is a Professor Emerita in the school of Public Health at the University of Texas Health Science Center st Houston. She is the author/editor of seven books and more than 70 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the topics of comparative international health policy, public/private policy partnerships, competition, the implications of investor status for the provision of health services, pharmacy policy, and post-modernism. Theme group: Accountability
Post-doctoral and Research Fellows
Gudmund Ågotnes is currently an Associate Professor, Department of Welfare and Participation, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. He is an Anthropologist and a former research fellow at the Centre for Care Research. His research interests include institutional and cultural conditions within long-term residential care, particularly the development of regimes of practices or “staffing cultures”. His thesis: “The Institutional Practice – Dynamics of Practice at Nursing Homes: An Ethnographic Study of Variation in Hospitalization Amidst Uncertainty and Continuity” covers the complex relationship between decisions about hospitalization of frail elderly residents of nursing homes, the conditions to which the institutions must relate and regimes of practices developed locally. Additional research interests include distance and collaboration between the generalized and the specialized health sector, staff-physician collaboration at nursing homes and social life of residents at institutions. Theme group: Accountability
Dr. Albert Banerjee is currently an Assistant Professor and Health Research Chair in Community Health and Aging at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick. He is a Medical Sociologist whose research explores the existential and political dimensions of health, illness and mortality. His research has developed critiques of the management of mortality through the analysis of a number of case studies, including: euthanasia, hospice, hypertension and nursing homes. With the aim of contributing to a more compassionate, equitable and life-sustaining society, his current research explores alternatives to the ethos of mastery and control investigating, on the one hand, the logic of care and its application to nursing home quality improvement and, on the other hand,contemplative philosophies and the unique relationships they enable to health and mortality. He was a former CoFAS/Marie Curie research fellow at Stockholm University in Sweden. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Rachel Barken was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow with research interests in the sociology of aging, formal and informal care arrangements, the social and political aspects of home and long-term care, and gender. She completed her doctoral degree, funded by SSHRC, at McMaster University in 2015. Her thesis, “Age Relations and Care: Older People’s Experiences of Self-Care, Family/Friend Caregiving, and Formal Home Care,” explored the boundaries and intersections between systems of care from the perspectives of older persons receiving home care. For her postdoctoral research she investigated understandings of the skills involved in care work, as well as the intersections of family caregiving and formal care provision in long-term care settings. Dr. Barken has published in such journals as: Canadian Review of Sociology, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Health and Social Care in the Community, Canadian Journal on Aging, and Canadian Review of Social Policy. Theme group: Approaches to Care
Dr. Ruth Lowndes was a full-time Research Associate at York University, engaging in research-related work in long-term care within the “Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care” project. She entered the project after completing her doctoral dissertation “Diabetes Care and Serious Mental Illness: An Institutional Ethnography” in 2012. In this ethnographical study, she used observation and interviewing to examine the everyday actualities of living with both mental illness and diabetes within the constraints of group home care. This research orientation, with an interest in improving health care and outcomes for those living and working in long-term care facilities, continues in her current work. Ruth is also registered with the College of Nurses of Ontario and is a Certified Diabetes Educator. Theme group: Accountability
Dr. Beatrice Müller is a Political Scientist and holds a PhD in social work/education science. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vechta, Germany. In her dissertation she developed a theoretical concept (value-abjection) to analyse the permanent devaluation of care in capitalist societies. In her postdoctoral research she explores precarious working conditions of workers in LTC settings considered as ancillary to care, e.g. cleaners. Theme group: Work Organization
Collaborator
Dr. Nasreen Khatri is a Clinician Associate with the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest. Her research focus is on cognitive therapy, theory and the brain mechanisms underlying depression in mid-life and older adults. She is the principal investigator on a study with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) assessing Canada’s first multilingual group program on evidence-based talk therapy principles for older adult caregivers.