Karen Palmer
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Lecturer - Instructor Lecturer and Practicum Coordinator
Biography:
Karen Palmer
holds two graduate degrees in Public Health (MPH with a focus on International
Health and MS with a focus on Health Policy and Planning) and a Graduate
Certificate in Urban and Regional Planning, all from the University of Hawaii
(Manoa). Originally from Canada, Karen divided her time during 1984-2006
between Canada, the US, and Switzerland, joining the Faculty of Health Sciences
at Simon Fraser University in 2008. As someone who has lived with one foot on
either side of the Canada-U.S. border for more two decades, and who has also
recently lived in Europe, she brings a unique understanding of the practice of
public health, of health care delivery systems, and of international health
policies. Her MS thesis
focused on the associations between rapid social change, prenatal care and,
ultimately, birth outcomes in the indigenous people of Saipan, located in the
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Her MPH graduate
work focused on a (then) new initiative of the World Health Organization, the
Healthy Cities Project, which continues to promote comprehensive and systematic
policy and planning with a special emphasis on health inequalities and urban
poverty, the needs of vulnerable groups, participatory governance, and the
social, economic, and environmental determinants of health.
Research Interests:
For the past 20
years Karen has been involved in the practice of public health, mostly in
health policy research and development and health planning, bridging theory and
practice in a variety of public health settings. In the late 80s,
she served as a clinic assistant and educator with the Marimed Foundation’s
multi-national health care team aboard a 156-foot triple masted top-sail
schooner, Tole Mour (meaning “gift of
life and health”), a self-contained health services ship that delivered primary
care to the people of the Marshall Islands, the most remote coral atolls in the
world, located in the heart of the Pacific Basin. She lived in
Hawaii from 1985-1995 where she worked as a Senior Health Planner for the
Hawaii State Department of Health in the Office of Policy, Planning, and
Program Development, focusing on Primary Care and Rural Health in the Hawaiian
Islands. She later served as a consultant to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health
Division at a time when Hawaii was under a “consent decree” to correct
deficiencies in their children’s mental health programs, as well as a
consulting to other organizations including the Hawaii Nurses Association, the
American Nurses Association, Hawaii Child and Family Service, and Utah State
University, among others. Karen worked for
nearly three years at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva,
Switzerland, as a technical officer within both the Communicable Disease and
the Non-Communicable Disease Branches.
During that time she compiled and analyzed the strategic planning data
for, and co-authored, the Global
Tuberculosis Control Report for the years 2002, 2003, and 2004. She was a
WHO liaison to representatives from the 22 high-burden countries — those
countries that account for 80% of the global burden of TB — for planning
related to global TB control. She also coordinated a study of human resources
for health as they pertain to global TB control, and authored a strategic plan
for scaling up the STEPwise approach to global non-communicable disease risk
factor surveillance. She was at WHO when the SARS outbreak first occurred,
and experienced first-hand the evolution of the global community’s response to
this new threat. She continues to follow with close interest the epidemiology
of the budding global epidemics and pandemics. Her passion for
more than two decades has been comparative international health care systems
and health care systems reform, with a particular interest in comparative
US/Canada health care policies. She serves as a board advisor to, and former
board member of, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a progressive
advocacy group dedicated to leading the U.S. toward a universal,
publicly-funded, single-payer, national health program. Since returning to Canada in 2006, she has served on the advisory
board of Canadian Doctors for Medicare (CDM), working with them in their
efforts to preserve, protect, and enhance Canada’s publicly-funded Medicare
system. In 2007, she was appointed Research Associate with the Canadian Centre
for Policy Alternatives (British Columbia Office) where she collaborates with
other researchers from BC, Canada, and the US on health care policy and health
care systems research.
Teaching Interests:
Public health
practice, comparative health care policy. |
MS
MPH
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