Université de Montréal receives a major grant from the Pan-Canadian Women’s Health Coalition

UdeM pharmacy professor Anick Bérard will use her $840,000 grant over four years to set up a hub aimed at reducing gender inequalities in reproductive health care.


Université de Montréal pharmacy professor Anick Bérard is the new CAMCCO-Outreach Hub lead for the Pan-Canadian Women’s Health Coalition. She’ll receive a $840,000 grant over four years from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to set up the hub.

Its goal is to reduce inequalities in reproductive care outcomes through the effective translation of information or data into knowledge that pregnant women and healthcare providers can use to provide better education and care, and to improve public policies, particularly for marginalized people.

The CAMCCO-Outreach Hub will leverage and build on the national research (CAMCCO-Research) and training infrastructure (CAMCCO-Learn) platforms that Bérard already leads, to position knowledge translation and dissemination strategies and activities at the intersection of the two.

While the initiative’s main target is women of childbearing age, including pregnant and lactating women and new parents, it also aims to better inform the general population and perinatal care teams.

“We have four objectives for the CAMCCO-Outreach Hub,” explained Bérard, the project’s principal investigator.

“First, we want to provide valid, reliable and up-to-date bilingual information on the safety of medication use in pregnancy. Second, we aim to raise awareness about the importance of considering the safety of medication use in pregnancy overall and in sub-populations historically excluded from the public discourse. Third, we wish to support informed decision making about maternal and fetal health. And, more generally, we wish to contribute evidence-based knowledge on medication and pregnancy.”