Sites and Mailing Lists

Victorian Order of Nurses (VON Canada) has recently revitalized its bilingual website, www.caregiver-connect.ca. The site is dedicated to providing more answers, quickly and easily, to family caregivers, to better support them in their vital caregiving role.

The majority of the 3-5 million family caregivers in Canada are women, many of them struggling to care for loved ones, hold down a job and be a wife/mother/neighbour at the same time.  VON shares the goal of improving the health of these invaluable Canadian caregivers.

Check out the VON’s site here. 

The Canadian Virtual Health Library (CVHL) has a new website which contains a "Virtual Library". The Library will soon contain licensed resources, but for now provides indexed links to freely available health information, in both English and French.  These links provide health librarians and health practitioners with easy access to high quality health information.  Each has been selected by an expert panel of health librarians with the goal of providing high quality, evidence-informed, health information resources.  This continuously updated free content will serve as a complement to the licensed resources that will be licensed by CVHL. 

The official launch of the website will occur at the annual Canadian Health Libraries Association Conference in Calgary from May 27-30.

Browse the new site at www.cvhl-bvcs.ca  You may also register in the site to comments, participate in community forums, and suggest new content.

For more information please contact:

Jennifer Bayne, Project Lead : jennifer.bayne@knowledge-able.com

A new queer health website has been launched. This project was initiated by the GLBTT* Sexual Health Promotion Coalition, and involved a collaboration of many community members. Check out getiton.ca!

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Gender and Health (IGH) and the Campbell and Cochrane Equity Methods Group are pleased to announce the launch of the IGH Cochrane Corner. The IGH Cochrane Corner highlights reviews pertinent to gender, sex, and health questions.  It aims to introduce those working in gender, sex, and health to the methods of the Cochrane Collaboration and, reciprocally, to bring awareness of sex- and gender-based analyses to the Cochrane community. The Corner will provide a range of knowledge users with a gender- and sex-focused entrée into the vast collection of research evidence provided through the Cochrane Library. By creating a focused collection of systematic reviews relevant to gender, sex, and health, the IGH Cochrane Corner will be a valuable tool for knowledge translation in the field.

Given the breadth of The Cochrane Library at over 4,000 reviews, the IGH Corner privileges recently released reviews and will eventually extend to older syntheses; the Corner is a living resource and will expand over time. The first two reviews featured in the IGH Corner focus on brief alcohol interventions in primary care and the use of cranberries for preventing urinary tract infections. 

The Corner also features an original series of Cochrane “Columns." These highlight methodological, substantive, or newsworthy issues related to sex, gender, health, and systematic reviews. The columns reflect current knowledge and activities in the field, and are available both online and in the IGH Intersections newsletter. The first column will be released in fall 2010.
 
Visit the IGH Cochrane Corner. Please feel free to link to the Corner from your websites or other resources.

The new film STILL DOING IT explores the lives of older women. Partnered, single, straight, gay, black and white nine extraordinary women, age 67-87, express with startling honesty and humor how they feel about themselves, sexuality and love in later life and the poignant realities of aging.

To watch the trailer and learn more go to stilldoingit.com

The new Manitoba Provincial Health Ethics Network (MB-PHEN) website is now online. It is a portal for health care providers to link to health ethics resources and strategies in Manitoba and beyond. MB-PHEN was created in 2009 as a collaboration of Manitoba RHAs. The goal of MB-PHEN is to advance integrative ethics in health care in Manitoba. Please share this weblink with your colleagues.

Please note: There are similar networks in Alberta and Nova Scotia linked to on MB-PHEN.

A groundbreaking new resource to guide donors, policy makers and program managers in planning effective HIV/AIDS interventions for women and girls was launched by Open Society Institute (OSI) at the XVIII International AIDS Conference with presentations by authors Jill Gay, Karen Hardee, Melanie Croce-Galis and Shannon Kowalski.

What Works for Women and Girls: Evidence for HIV/AIDS Interventions - now available at www.whatworksforwomen.org - is a comprehensive review of successful HIV programming for women and girls spanning 2,000 articles and reports with data from more than 90 countries.

IWHC shapes international policy and builds local capacity for women’s health and human rights in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  We leverage our work in these two very different, but critically linked worlds – to change thinking, redirect funding and motivate action by people and institutions that can secure rights and health for women. 

For more information, please visit the website.

Arts4Choice invites you to have a look at their new site, send them any feedback and comments, follow them on twitter, "like" them on Facebook.

Their new email address is choices@arts4choice.com

They thank again all those who donated and look forward to keeping in touch with all of you and continuing to be a part of the struggle for choice in Canada.

Stirrups and Stories is a grassroots initiative to improve health outcomes and the care women receive in the OB or GYN office by collecting women's stories to educate and empower both patients and providers.

The purpose of Stirrups and Stories is multi-fold: first and foremost, to give space to women to talk about their experiences. Who really asks, 'so how is OB/GYN care for you, ladies?' Not usually the providers or medical establishment, and other women tend to ask (in our experience) in one-on-one or friendship settings. But this information is valuable! If we start listening to the women, and collecting their stories, we can discover reasons women do or do not seek care, what concerns women actually have, how providers can improve the care they give their patients, what's going divinely right and what's going egregiously wrong.

See the online gallery of photos and stories on the website here.