Research Fridays @ Intersections of Gender - Is the Inertia in Women's Heart Health Outcomes a Question of Intersectional Stereotyping?
21 January 2022
Research Fridays @ Intersections of Gender - Is the Inertia in Women's Heart Health Outcomes a Question of Intersectional Stereotyping? with Colleen Norris, moderated by Nat Hurley, February 4 @ 12:15 P.M. MDT
Heart disease in women is on the rise and is the leading cause of death for women worldwide. While the past decade has seen a proliferation of research identifying that the causes of heart disease can be “different for women,” heart attack symptoms are NOT RECOGNIZED in over 50% of women. Furthermore, the causes of heart disease can also be different for women. At present, 300 women a year in Alberta present at an Emergency department, are discharged home and go on to suffer from a heart attack within 30 days of the ER presentation. Our research in sex and gender science suggest that intersectional stereotyping may mean that health care workers use one lens in caring for a person's “heart,” which is presently male centric, and overlook sex and gender attributes that make a person's presentation of heart events unique.
Dr. Colleen Norris is a Professor and Clinician Scientist with University of Alberta’s Faculties of Nursing, Medicine, and School of Public Health. Her PhD is in clinical epidemiology. Dr. Norris, a nurse by training, completed post-doctoral training with the Canadian Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Team (CCORT) and Tomorrows Outcome Researchers in Cardiovascular Health (TORCH) in health outcomes research and developed the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcome Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease (APPROACH) follow-up program. Dr. Norris is the Scientific Director of the Cardiovascular Health and Stroke Strategic Clinical Network for Alberta Health Services. Her program of research focuses on the sex and gender factors that impact women’s heart health. She is the past Chair of the Canadian Women’s Heart Health Alliance (CWHHA) Health Policy and Services (HP&S) working group, whose mandate is to implement policies that advance our understanding of the unique sex and gender factors affecting the outcomes of women’s heart health. She is a committee member on the Women’s Heart and Brain Health Network Research Steering Committee, and is actively involved in advancing sex and gender-based analysis and reporting in Heart & Stroke funded research. In 2018, Dr. Norris was designated as the sex and gender champion on the CCS clinical guidelines committee where she established and published a methodology that is used to incorporate sex and gender specific information into CCS clinical practice guidelines. Dr. Norris is a Fellow of the American Heart Association and the CO-PI in a CIHR/GENDER-NET Plus research project- GOING-FWD, an international collaborative of researchers from five countries, evaluating the impact of sex and gender factors on outcomes. Dr. Norris has mentored over 80 students/trainees. She has presented extensively and has over 300 publications in the areas of sex and gender differences in cardiovascular treatment and outcomes, and women’s heart health.