Carleton PhD Candidate Wins Ontario Women’s Health Scholars Award

Krystal Kehoe MacLeod, a doctoral candidate with the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, has been awarded a 2012-13 Doctoral Ontario Women’s Health Scholars Award.

The award, which will commence in September 2012, is worth $20,000, with a research allowance of $2,000.

The Council of Ontario Universities (COU) announced the award on Thursday. Kehoe MacLeod won the prize for her research project entitled Integrated Care Programs for the Delivery of Home Health and Social Care to the Vulnerable Elderly: An International Study of Program Characteristics and Promising Practices.

Kehoe MacLeod is thrilled at winning the award. “This support for my research on evaluating the contributions of home care using a gender-based analysis means so much. In addition to the Council of Ontario Universities and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor, Hugh Armstrong, and my mentor, Janet Lum, for their guidance and encouragement.”

Her research looks at integrated care as it applies to home care programs in Ontario. Integrated care is the process of connecting and aligning social care and health care services and promoting the teamwork of paid and unpaid care providers into a co-ordinated continuum of care. Kehoe MacLeod is studying the perspectives of service users, formal and informal home care providers and program administrators of several promising integrated care programs across Canada.

“Research in this area has important economic and policy implications for women since they make up the majority of both home care recipients and the paid and unpaid care providers in the home care sector,” notes Kehoe MacLeod.

The PhD student has presented her research at several conferences and has collaborated on multiple research projects. She is currently working as a research assistant on the SSHRC-funded study Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices. She has already earned numerous awards and scholarships and has received funding for her graduate research from the Canadian Policy Research Network.