Research
Highlights
Dr. Bourgeault has been privileged to have a research intensive career focused on the health professions, always taking a gender lens.
Starting in 1989, she focused on physicians' attitudes first towards patients taking alternative medicine for cancer treatments for her Masters thesis, and concurrently an examination of physicians and nurses attitudes towards patients’ control over dying as a research assistant. She shifted her focus to the recent integration of the midwifery profession for her doctoral dissertation, completed in 1996, but also contributed as a research assistant to a study of the relationship between the professions of medicine, nursing and the state.
Her SSHRC and CIHR funded postdoctoral research between 1996 and 1998 expanded upon her research on midwifery with a focus on the evolving relationship between doctors, nurses and midwives as midwifery became integrated into the Ontario health care system. For her CIHR New Investigator Award in 2000, she expanded her research on interprofessional relations in maternity care to also examine primary and mental health care, including a comparative focus between Canada and the United States.
The comparative lens she began to inculcate was expanded even more for her Canada Research Chair in Comparative Health Labour Policy she held from 2004 to 2009 where she examined the role of internationally educated health professionals in domestic health and immigration policy in Canada, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. She would later complement these ‘destination’ country perspectives with ‘source’ countries perspectives focused on India, the Philippines, South Africa and Jamaica. These studies looked both at the migration and integration experiences of a range of health workers, including physicians, nurses, midwives, and others.
The opportunity to focus on health workforce research extensively came with the awarding of the CIHR Chair in Health Human Resources in 2009. From this base she helped launch the Ontario Health Human Resources Research Network and in 2011 the Canadian Health Human Resources Network funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and CIHR respectively. In 2014, there was an explicit opportunity to acknowledge Dr. Bourgeault’s gender-based contributions with the CIHR Chair in Gender, Work and Health Human Resources.
Building on her comparative perspective on the highly gendered female midwifery and maternity care workforces, she contributed to team-based research on care relationships in the home, community and long term care sectors. From 2017 until 2024, she led the CIHR and SSHRC funded Healthy Professional Worker Partnership, which focused on the mental health, leaves of absence and return to work experiences of professional workers from an intersectional gender lens, including through the COVID-19 pandemic. With funding from Status of Women Canada, she led the Empowering Women Leaders Initiative in Health which focused on health care and health sciences.
In 2019, she was awarded the University of Ottawa Research Chair in Gender, Diversity and the Professions which focused on gender equity research in academic as well as the health professions. As the co-lead of the ESDC funded Team Primary Care initiative from 2022 to 2024, Dr. Bourgeault has re-engaged in research on interprofessional primary care including a focus on the psychological health and safety of professional workers. Her University of Ottawa Research Chair was renewed in 2024.