Meaghan Thumath on COVID-19 and Inequities in Health

What can COVID-19 teach us about health inequities that are present in our society? Our latest installment of Below the Radar Pandemic Conversations explores the current situation of COVID-19 and what previous pandemics can teach us about what is happening globally. Am Johal sits down with Meaghan Thumath, a clinical scientist at the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity and clinical associate professor at UBC’s School of Nursing. 

In this video, they discuss her previous international work studying and combatting pandemics and how this has informed her current understandings of COVID-19, both globally and locally here in Vancouver, Canada. Meaghan also discusses the importance of nursing and how we in Canada may benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to medicine, especially with regards to our COVID-19 response.

About Meaghan Thumath

Meaghan Thumath, RN, BSN, MPH, D.LSHTM, is a clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) School of Nursing and holds a clinician scientist affiliation with the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity and a Trudeau Scholar at the University of Oxford. For over a decade Meaghan has provided technical assistance to international organizations such as WHO, UNDP, UNAIDS, the World Bank and the Global Fund to End AIDS, TB and Malaria supporting human rights and health equity for marginalized populations in Central Asia, Latin America, West and Central Africa and MENA. In Canada, she has served as the Chief of Staff (Senior MA) to the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction, as clinical coordinator of North America’s first supervised injection facility, Insite, and as a Street Nurse and Senior Practice Leader at the BC Centre for Disease Control. In 2019 she worked for the World Health Organization’s Ebola Response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). She is also a public health delegate on the Canadian Red Cross Emergency Response Unit and an active member of the WHO Emergencies Programme (WHE) External Emergency Roster where she has worked on COVID-19 preparedness for both PHAC and WHO-AFRO.

Listen to other episodes from the Below the Radar Pandemic Conversations series.