Partnerships are at the core of the JCB
We partner and collaborate with government, health institutions, professional bodies, community groups, and other organizations to strengthen ethical decision-making for more positive local and global health outcomes.
Advancing knowledge through academic partnerships
We are closely aligned with other academic units both within the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, such as the Centre for Global Health, the Institute for Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation, and the Institute for Pandemics, as well as more broadly across the University of Toronto and the Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network. Our interdisciplinary faculty are drawn from academic units across the St. George campus, and we coordinate the Collaborative Specialization in Bioethics with 12 collaborating academic graduate units.
Informing government policies
We have been called upon by various governing bodies (both provincially and federally) to work on urgent health issues that require an applied ethics lens. Recent government collaborators include the Ontario Ministry of Health and Health Canada. They requested our expertise to address significant health system challenges such as medical assistance in dying, drug supply shortages, and emergency preparedness.
Partnerships driven by today’s wicked health problems
Most recently, we have received donor support from AMS to accelerate knowledge and inform practice on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care.
Supporting the bioethics community across Canada
We are an institutional member of the Canadian Bioethics Society. In 2016, we hosted the 27th Annual CBS Conference in Toronto, and this May we are the host to the 32nd Annual Bioethics Virtual Conference – the first to be entirely online. This year’s conference theme is “Behind the Mask: Ethical Issues Revealed by COVID-19 in Canada and Beyond”. Registration is now open.
In addition, we support the Clinical, Organizational and Research Ethics (CORE) Network which is the largest community of practice of Practicing Healthcare Ethicists in Canada. The Network’s members provide bioethics support at various U of T affiliated health institutions. They also collaborate on the development of policy documents, discussion papers, ethics frameworks, and other professional practice resources to address pressing bioethics issues.
Bioethics partnerships for global health
Since 2002, we’ve worked closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) and we were the first to be designated as a WHO Collaborating Centre for Bioethics (WHO-CC). We collaborate globally with other WHO-CCs as part of the Global Network of WHO-CCs to provide ethical guidance on global health issues including pandemic planning, epidemics (like Ebola and tuberculosis), public health surveillance, big data, and artificial intelligence.
Contact us
We welcome new partners and collaborators. If you would like to explore opportunities for partnership or collaboration in bioethics, please email us at jcb.director@utoronto.ca.