Dr. Martha Traverso-Yépez
Canada Research Chair in Health Promotion and Community Development
Phone: 709-777-8584
Email: mtraverso@mun.ca
Coming to Canada from
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal (RN), Brazil
Research
involves:
Promoting health, performing community-based
participatory research and building relationships.
Research
relevance
Identifying and developing community-health-empowering practices
through participatory-action research, and developing a centre to
promote healthy environments and community participation in rural
Newfoundland and Labrador.
Promoting Healthy
Communities, Empowering Lives
Newfoundland and Labrador has a rich history of strong family and
community ties built to deal with the province’s often harsh
living and working conditions. In recent decades, though, the
area’s changing economic and social situation has brought new
challenges to its communities’ physical and social
well-being.
Meanwhile, despite of all the progress in health-care initiatives,
research has shown that lower social and living conditions are
still directly linked to poor health outcomes. To tackle such
problems, there has been more and more emphasis in recent decades
on health-promotion initiatives. Following a focus on risky
behaviours and healthy lifestyles in the ’80s and part of the
’90s, recent years have seen growing attention paid to the
socio-economical and political aspects affecting health and
illness.
As Canada Research Chair in Health Promotion and Community
Development, Dr. Traverso-Yepez is working on developing a number
of key practices to empower community health through
participatory-action research, bringing together all stakeholders
so they can contribute to research and act on it. Her process aims
to:
- identify and study the evolution of existing health-promotion practices sponsored by health-care and human-service organizations or community action in Newfoundland and Labrador;
- investigate how collaboration on health-promotion practices works both in networks of organizations and in the communities involved;
- evaluate and develop the Internet’s capacity to help build co-operative relationships between available services and the community; and
- develop key community-empowering practices to address target health problems.
Dr. Traverso-Yepez is also developing the Center for Community Health Promotion Research and Practices at Memorial University. Though the Center and the rest of her research as Chair, she is encouraging not only individual people but entire communities to take a new, empowered approach to their own health.
