Renee Turner

Renee Turner

ccphe@familymed.ubc.ca

Researcher in Public Health

Area of Interest:

• Prison Medicine

Highlighted work:

Renee Turner coordinates 3 community-based prison health projects focusing on preventive health, cancer prevention and HIV at The Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education (CCPHE).

Opportunities for Involvement:

• Mentorship

• Educational lectures

• Practicum placements

• CCPHE offers a prison health elective for family practice resident students. Interested students please email Ben Fussell at prison.elective@familymed.ubc.ca

Ruth Elwood Martin (Prison Health)

Ruth Elwood Martin

Current roles:

Health Professional – Family Physician; Director, Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education

Researcher – MPH; Lead research faculty for UBC family practice residency program

Clinical Professor – UBC Department of Family Practice

Description:

Dr. Martin has practiced family medicine in BC Correctional Centre clinics for 16 years. She currently has switched her focus to full time prison medicine research and advocacy. She began the “Unlocking the Gates of Health” project, which offers mentorship to incarcerated women as they transition into the community upon release around urgent health needs, including food, affordable housing and continuation of medication and addiction counseling

In addition, as director of the CCPHE, Dr. Martin has served as the Principal Investigator for the centre’s two preventive health projects, P4H and P4C. The projects were designed to promote and improve holistic health and preventative health practices of incarcerated individuals in the ares of mental health and addictions, cancer and blood-borne diseases.  While P4H is a participatory approach to developing preventive health tools for BC individuals with Incarceration experience, P4C is a participatory approach to improving cancer screenings and early detection among individuals with incarceration experience.

Dr. Martin also supervises a Prison Health Advocacy Education elective for family practice residents and undergraduate medical students. Through this elective, participants experience the complexities of the correctional health system from ‘inside the gates’, and develop an understanding of the responses of prison health care practitioners, community organizations and individuals with incarceration experience to prison health determinants and inequities, in order to become more effective health advocates for prison health.

Dr. Martin’s other areas of interest are: Access and Resources to health care, Health education and advocacy, Maternal and Child health

Get involved – Dr. Martin is interested in connecting with students, practitioners, and members of the community to provide mentorship, opportunities in advocacy work, research, academic conversations, idea generation, and knowledge translation. She invites all the relationships that may come from the Social Medicine Network and is excited to see what develops.

Contact:

ruth.martin@familymed.ubc.ca

T: 604-822-2496