Un jour dans la vie d’un récipiendaire du prix honorifique R.D. Defries

• Dr Trevor Hancock, Professeur et chercheur principal à l'École de santé publique et de politique sociale de l'Université de Victoria

Dr Trevor Hancock n’avait jamais envisagé de devenir médecin de santé publique. Il s’est inscrit comme étudiant dans un hôpital d’enseignement très spécialisé de Londres en 1967 (« oui, je suis vieux! » dit-il) après avoir été instituteur bénévole pendant un an dans un petit village du Sarawak, sur l’île de Bornéo, en pensant retourner y travailler ensuite. Diplômé six ans plus tard et écologiste convaincu, il voulait être médecin de famille. Presque immédiatement, il s’est installé au Canada, où il a exercé la médecine familiale en région rurale au Nouveau-Brunswick, puis dans un centre de santé communautaire de Toronto. Mais il s’est lassé de traiter des patients aux problèmes récurrents ancrés dans des facteurs sociaux, économiques et environnementaux, « de les rafistoler pour qu’ils retournent au combat au lieu d’arrêter la guerre », comme il dit. Il s’est donc dirigé vers la santé publique. On connaît la suite : la réforme de la santé publique, les politiques pour la santé, les villes en santé, le Parti vert, l’Association canadienne des médecins pour l’environnement, les soins de santé écologiques, les fonctions de base de la santé publique, les déterminants écologiques de la santé, la gouvernance de la santé... Trevor partagera tout cela durant son webinaire, ainsi que ses réflexions sur l’avenir de la santé publique.

Cette session s’inscrit dans le cadre de la Série de webinaire sur les carrières en santé publique et se déroule en anglais.

Biographie

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a public health physician and health promotion consultant and is currently a Professor and Senior Scholar at the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria. His main areas of interest are population health promotion, healthy cities and communities, public health, healthy public policy, environment and health, healthy and 'green' hospitals, health policy and planning, and health futurism. He is one of the founders of the (now global) Healthy Cities and Communities movement, originated the term 'healthy public policy', and has been described as “one of the ten best health futurists in the world”. 

For more than 30 years he has worked as a consultant for local communities, municipal, provincial and national governments, health care organizations, NGOs and the World Health Organization. Internationally, he was a member of the Knowledge Network on Urban Settings (part of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health), a member of the Advisory Board for the Urban HEART project of the WHO Kobe Centre for Health and Development, and a member of the Global Research Network on Urban Health Equity. In the past he was the first leader of the Green Party for both Canada and Ontario in the 1980s, and later co-founded both the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care.  

He was made an Honourary Life Member of the Canadian Public Health Association in 1990 and an Honourary Fellow in the UK’s Faculty of Public Health in 2015. In 2017 he was awarded the Defries Medal, the CPHA’s highest award, presented for outstanding contributions in the broad field of public health, as well as a Lifetime Contribution Award from Health Promotion Canada.

From 2012 – 2015 he led a CPHA workgroup that has resulted in a comprehensive Discussion Paper on the ecological determinants health (May 2015) and was an external reviewer for the Rockefeller Foundation/ Lancet Commission on Planetary Health. He is now leading a series of local Conversations on the concept of Victoria as a One Planet Region and is endeavouring to have the University of Victoria explore its role in addressing the issue of the Anthropocene. 

He was appointed as a Senior Editor to the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Public Health in 2014 and in 2015 was invited to join the Editorial Board for a new Journal, Cities and Health. Since December 2014 he has written a regular weekly column on population and public health for the Times Colonist, the daily newspaper in Victoria.