Marjorie MacDonald – Past President

Marjorie MacDonaldMarjorie MacDonald has a background in public health nursing and holds a PhD in community health and health promotion. She currently teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs in nursing at the University of Victoria (UVIC) with a focus on community/public health nursing. Marjorie also teaches in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at UVIC and sits on their Advisory Committee.

She has been involved in the development of the curriculum for the Public Health Nursing area of focus in the MPH program. Marjorie is supervising several masters and PhD students who are conducting research in a variety of public health areas including: global health, HIV/AIDS prevention, food safety/security, violence prevention, the contribution of public health nursing to promoting reproductive health, health promotion and sexual health. Her research interests include public health policy and practice, public health services research specifically related to public health systems renewal, health equity, public health and primary care collaboration, public health human resources planning, adolescent health promotion, smoking and drug use prevention, adolescent health literacy, and advanced practice nursing in a public health context. For the past six years she has held a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Applied Public Health Chair in Public Health Education and Population Intervention Research. Cross cutting themes in her program of research include health equity, knowledge translation, innovative methodologies for studying complex public and population health interventions, and developing effective researcher-knowledge user partnerships.

Currently, she co-leads two large programs of research; one that is exploring public health systems renewal in BC and Canada and another examining the public health contribution to promoting health equity. She is co-director of the Core Public Health Functions Research Initiative (BC) along with Dr. Trevor Hancock. Together, they are leading an initiative to develop a public health services and systems research agenda for Canada.