Co-hosted by the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and the Centre for Global Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health
In 2021, The Dalla Lana School of Public Health’s Centre for Global Health in partnership with the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto launched a seminar series entitled, “Health Inc.: Corporations, Capitalism, and the Commercial Determinants of Health.” The objective of this seminar series is to create a forum to promote conversations, research training, and collaboration across sectors and disciplines regarding the impact of corporations and other commercial determinants of health.
Our Team
Quinn Grundy, Assistant Professor
Dr. Grundy’s research explores the interactions between the medically-related industry, including pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and public health systems and the implications for the delivery of health services, health evidence, and health policies. Dr. Grundy is the author of Infiltrating Healthcare: How Marketing Works Underground to Influence Nurses (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), which details the first in-depth study of the ways that registered nurses interact with pharmaceutical and medical device company representatives.
Dr. Grundy serves as the Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Governance, Accountability, and Transparency in the Pharmaceutical Sector , and is cross-appointed to the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto. She serves as Associate Director, Nursing, for the Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health, and Sustainable Care, a multi-faculty unit at the University of Toronto. In these roles, Dr. Grundy leads and supports efforts to improve the governance and sustainability of health technology systems through research, education, practice change and policy development
Erica Di Ruggiero, Associate Professor
Erica is the Director of the Centre for Global Health and Director of the Collaborative Specialization of Global Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She is an Associate Professor of Global Health in the Division of Social and Behavioural Health Sciences and holds non-budgetary cross-appointments as Associate Professor in the Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation, and the Department of Health & Society (UTSC). She is a Full Member of the School of Graduate Studies. Her research focuses on evaluating the health and gender equity impacts of different policies and interventions on structurally marginalized groups in public, private and non-profit sectors within and outside of health.
Matthew Tracey, PhD student IHPME
Matthew Tracey is a registered nurse and a Doctoral Student in Health Policy with the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. His research interests include: the political economy of health, the financialization of healthcare, and social epidemiology. He works as an RN at Women’s College Hospital and as a Clinical Research Nurse Coordinator at the Hospital for Sick Children.
Daniel Eisenkraft Klein, PhD
Daniel Eisenkraft Klein is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He was a co-founder of the Health Inc. Seminar Series. His program of work primarily focuses on the political economy and regulation of medicines, with a particular emphasis on the influence of stakeholder groups in opioid and psychedelic policy settings.
Seminar Archives
Resource Library
Glover RE, Petticrew MP. (2021). Defining the commercial determinants of health after COVID-19., European Journal of Public Health, 31(3). Doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckab164.808
World Health Organization. Commercial determinants of health. (2022). https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/commercial-determinants-of-health
Lee, K & Freudenberg, N. Public health roles in addressing commercial determinants of health. Annual Review of Public Health, 2022 43:1, 375-395. doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-052220-020447
Lacy-Nichols J, Marten R, Crosbie E, Moodie R. (2022). The public health playbook: ideas for challenging the corporate playbook. Lancet Global Health, 10(7), e1067 – e1072. doi:10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00185-1
Knai, C et al. (2021). The case for developing a cohesive systems approach to research across unhealthy commodity industries. BMJ Global Health, 6(2), e003543. doi.org:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003543
Knai, C., Petticrew, M., Mays, N., Capewell, S., Cassidy, R., Cummins, S., Eastmure, E., Fafard, P., Hawkins, B., Jensen, J., Katikireddi, S., Mwatsama, M., Orford J., & Weishaar, H. (2018). systems thinking as a framework for analyzing commercial determinants of health. The Milbank Quarterly, 96, 472–498. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.12339
Standing, G. (2014). The Precariat. Contexts, 13(4), 10–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504214558209
Cortinois, A. A., & Birn, A.-E. (2021). What’s Technology Got to Do With It? Power, Politics, and Health Equity Beyond Technological Triumphalism. Global Policy, 12(S6), 75–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12982
Sekalala, S., Forman, L., Hodgson, T., Mulumba, M., Namyalo-Ganafa, H., & Meier, B. M. (2021). Decolonising human rights: how intellectual property laws result in unequal access to the COVID-19 vaccine. BMJ global health, 6(7), e006169. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006169
Barrett J. Commercial determinants of health and nursing research: Opportunities for advancement. Clinical Nursing Research. 2023;32(7):995-999. doi:10.1177/10547738231185243
Chimonas S, Mamoor M, Zimbalist S A, Barrow B, Bach P B, Korenstein D et al. (2021). Mapping conflict of interests: scoping review. BMJ, 375, e066576 doi:10.1136/bmj-2021-066576
Forman, L., Jackson, C., and Fajber, K.(2023).Can we move beyond vaccine apartheid? Examining the determinants of the COVID-19 vaccine gap. Global Public Health, 18(1), 1-18.
Miller FA, Young SB, Dobrow M & Shojania KG. Vulnerability of the medical product supply chain: the wake-up call of COVID-19. BMJ Quality and Safety, 30,331-335. DOI: 10.1136/bmjqs-2020-012133
Loewenson R, Godt S, Chanda-Kapata P. (2022). Asserting public health interest in acting on commercial determinants of health in sub-Saharan Africa: insights from a discourse analysis. BMJ Global Health, 7:e009271. https://gh.bmj.com/content/7/7/e009271.info
Eisenkraft Klein, D., Shawanda, A. (2023) Bridging the commercial determinants of Indigenous health and the legacies of colonization: A critical analysis. Global Health Promotion. doi: 10.1177/17579759231187614
Crocetti AC, Cubillo (Larrakia) B, Lock (Ngiyampaa) M, et al. (2022) The commercial determinants of Indigenous health and well-being: a systematic scoping review. BMJ Global Health, 7:e010366. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-010366