McGill Global Health Night: In conversation with the keynote speaker Dr. Gina Ogilvie
McGill Global Health Night is scheduled for November 2, 2021. Alec Regino, winner of Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Student Fellowship spoke with the keynote speaker Dr. Gina Ogilvie, Professor of Population and Global Health in the University of British Columbia in this engaging interview below.
By Alec Regino
A career in global health can take on a number of forms. For Canada Research Chair Dr. Gina Ogilvie, who currently works as a Professor at the University of British Columbia and as Senior Public Health Science for the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BC CDC), that career has brought her opportunities to work on health inequities in communities across the globe. As this year’s keynote speaker for McGill Global Health Program’s Global Health Night on November 2, Dr. Ogilvie will share her experiences and perspectives to students and faculty in global health and its related fields Ahead of the event, we asked Dr. Ogilvie to reflect on her work thus far and provide us with a sneak preview of her lecture.
Alec Regino: Let’s start with you. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what you do?
Dr. Gina Ogilvie: I’m a professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. By way of background, I'm a physician and I am trained in family medicine. I did a fellowship in population health and primary care, and then I did a master's and a doctorate in public health. I'm also an Associate Director for the Women's Health Research Institute and Senior Scientist at BC Centre for Disease Control as well.
AR: You're a recognized figure in the global health field, providing leadership in the BC CDC and conducting influential research that directs health policy, both in Canada and across the world. What first inspired you to pursue this field?
GO: So I think it was just a really practical question. I was passionate about women's health and I was sort of struck at how we had practical tools to address health and inequities, but they weren't being used.
It particularly coalesced for me around STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections) and cervical screening: when I started out, I worked a lot with primary care HIV, and that was around the time when we had ARVs (antiretroviral drugs), but they weren't necessarily being used in low- and middle-income settings because there were some perspectives or perceptions that folks wouldn't be able to handle the complex regimens and also around STI and pap screening.
We had these tools that were really effective in preventing STIs and cervical cancer and they weren't being deployed. So it started from a social justice lens with a practical question — why are these inequities existing and why do these tools not reach the people who could most benefit from it?
AR: Could you share a bit about your personal journey in global health. How did you build your career?
GO: What I would say about my career is that I've always thought it was more important not to say “I'm gonna have a career in global health” or “I'm gonna have a career as a scientist” or “I'm gonna get research grants.” What was the sort of mission of my career was wanting to address inequities in health, particularly for women. That was the driving platform for me and for my career. So when you have a mission like that, there are lots of ways that you can address that. For me, I was interested in care and in actual clinical care. And as I did my clinical care, I got interested in research because I felt that research would help to improve the health of the patients I was working with.
As I started to do research I built my skills up in that and I realized as a clinician-scientist, I brought a different, unique set of skills. I was interested in areas that perhaps other clinician-scientists weren't interested in. So by building up my skills in that area, I was then able to examine questions that perhaps others didn't see as important or weren't as high profile or high priority. I was always interested in global health, but by building my career, my science, and my questions in that way, I had skills and expertise to offer when global health partners came to Canada and said: “hey, we have an issue in cervical cancer or STIs or reproductive health, is there a way we could partner and work together?”
So then I was brought in to work in Uganda and then started to work there around the field of cervix cancer prevention and really looking at innovations to improve things like screening coverage. I did not have any vision of being a Canada Research Chair. Other than the fact that there weren’t any Canada Research Chairs then and there wasn't anything like the BC CDC in Ontario where I trained, what my career was really about was being open to ideas and to opportunities that would allow me to work, to improve health.
The other thing was, whenever I try to do something, I try to do it really well, even if it seems to be a small thing. I think that's also been influential because when you try really hard, you get better at it and then you get more interested in it. So that’s how I got to where I am.
AR: Could you tell me about a particular moment in your career where you felt your work or your research sparked some sort of important development or change in global health, and how you felt about that?
GO: I think one of the things that have been really important to my career has been collaboration. None of my successes were “I” success, they are really a “we” success. I was privileged to work on a team that looked at reduced dosing of the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine. The HPV vaccine is an exciting prevention opportunity that could prevent the infection that causes cervix cancer, it’s a very effective vaccine. But when it first came out, it was given in three doses. Our team in British Columbia with partners in Quebec and in Nova Scotia designed a trial to compare two doses versus three doses, using the more widely used vaccine. We were able to show that two doses of the vaccine were non-inferior to three doses. So that then led to changes in virtually every health policy, every vaccine policy program — the WHO (World Health Organization), the PAHO (Pan American Health Organization), European Medicines Association, UK Joint Vaccine Initiative, NACI (National Advisory Committee on Immunization) , and even the CDC Atlanta (Center for Disease Control).
Again, I was part of it, but we changed policy around the world and moved to two doses, which allowed a lot of countries to use scarce resources a bit more efficiently.
AR: And just to bring our conversation to the present, has living through a pandemic over the past two years changed your perspective at all in global health?
GO: I would say for me what has been most important about the pandemic is that often before, global health felt “out there.” And especially for Canadians, we often think that we're insulated from the world, and people who did global health were sort of “out there.” We could maybe dabble a little bit in issues that other folks faced, but it really wasn't that relevant to Canadians. I think what has changed for me in global health is that I see people now understanding in a very clear and very unambiguous way that global health matters. Even on a simple human level, if you weren’t engaged with the reality that there is suffering in the world and that we should, as citizens of the world, be concerned about the suffering of everyone, folks now understand that it does impact you. I think that's an important maturation for Canada, for the US, and for the world. And what I hope is people see that you need to invest in the health of everyone for all of us to be healthy and that health everywhere matters.
AR: The title of your keynote lecture for this year’s Global Health Night is “Be a Catalyst for Change: Careers in Global Health Research”. What do you have in store and what should attendees expect to learn about during your keynote?
GO: It’s going to be a lot of what we have been talking about, which is that I think people need to remain open to their careers. You need to be ready and willing to take opportunities when they come and be ready and willing for things that you don’t expect to be career changers, to actually have a huge influence. You can have a global health career by simply working in Canada and doing work that has global health import and global health lessons. It’s really important to think about what is your personal mission, what are your personal priorities, and really keep your mind open in that way.
If you take me as an example, I live in Canada, but I work in partnership with many people in low- and middle-income settings. My global health career might look different than others who have worked elsewhere. I have a different looking career, but I have a global health career. A lot of people seem to think there’s one route to working in global health, and what I would say to them is there is no one route. The most important thing is to keep yourself as open as possible.
Global Health Night 2021 will be held with limited in-person participation and online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and related safety protocols. Take the opportunity to register for the event before it’s too late. Look forward to your engagement at Global Health Night 2021.
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About the Author
Alec Regino completed his BA & MA in Sociology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is the former editor-in-chief of McGill International Review and has bylines in The Washington Post, The Diplomat, and East Asia Forum. Primary themes of Regino's work include immigration, Southeast Asia politics, and drug policy. He tweets at @alecregino.