For Dr. Shahirose Sadrudin Premji, inclusive health care isn’t just a goal, it’s a right.
“It's an individual's right to be treated equally,” says Dr. Premji. “As a researcher and a registered nurse, it's about creating a welcoming environment in a way that values culture, values gender, values race, values ethnicity. It’s appreciating that the pluralistic nature of our society is actually a strength. It’s about bringing that richness of who we are and how we are and where we are into care. That’s how I see inclusion.”
It’s a perspective essential to her role as a perinatal researcher studying the period from pregnancy to a year post-partum.
Her current research explores the psychological, social, cultural, biological, and environmental intersections patients experience and how that influences pregnant people's mental health, physical health, and pregnancy outcome.
Dr. Premji has identified two troubling gaps in perinatal research: a dearth of research about mental health during pregnancy and its impact on pregnancy outcomes with a focus on people in low- and middle-income countries and lack of an intersectional approach to properly capture the social determinants of mental health among marginalized and immigrant populations.
“I started as a neonatal nurse and a neonatal nurse practitioner. So, it was all about after birth for the work that I did. That's shifted and my work is more about pregnancy because I've also seen how hard life can be and how the social determinants of life are particularly challenging during pregnancy.”
One of the reasons Dr. Premji focuses her research on South Asian and East Asian communities is their underrepresentation in perinatal research in Canada.
She recently conducted a synthesis of perinatal mental health literature with the help of an undergraduate student, Oluwamisimi Oluwole, BNSc'26, and postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Helen Obilor, and was struck by the absence of research specific to South Asian and East Asian immigrant pregnant women despite them being the two largest immigrant groups in Canada.
For Dr. Premji, truly inclusive research means involving people whose issues you are trying to address in ways that represent the diversity of the population or the specific population of interest.
“The inclusion piece for me comes when we include people with lived experience, people who provide care for them, people's families because they’re integral to the pregnant person’s mental health, and then researchers, clinician researchers, and even policy decision makers,” she says. “We're heading in the right direction.”
Prioritizing inclusive research is a commitment she brings to her role as the Sally Smith Chair in Nursing, a five-year appointment that began in January 2023.
“We need to value the clinical work that nurses do and create opportunities that bridge the divide between academia and clinical practice. I think endowed chairs have the possibility to do that and do it in a way that enables us to address the challenges that are at the forefront of the health-care system.”
The Sally Smith Chair in Nursing was created as part of a $10-million donation to Queen’s by A. Britton Smith. The chair is named after his wife Edith “Sally” (Carruthers) Smith, who died in June 2012 after a battle with cancer. It is the largest donation to the School of Nursing in its 82-year history.
It’s an appointment that’s afforded Dr. Premji opportunities to work with the broader Kingston community and show that perinatal mental health is an important but underserved issue in the region.
With the assistance of Dr. Erna Snelgrove-Clarke, Vice-Dean (Health Sciences) & Director, School of Nursing, Dr. Premji helped establish a collaborative working group with the goal of creating a perinatal mental health network in the region, which wouldn’t have happened without Smith’s gift.
“We’re fortunate the Sally Smith Chair in Nursing is organized this way. It's not about driving one person's research, but about solving issues within the community. I think endowed chairs are great at addressing community issues because they are philanthropy driven and can be directed to this type of community need.”
