York University Distinguished Research Professor Pat Armstrong, in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, and her research team seek to identify promising practices for thinking about, planning and organizing long-term residential care.

In the project "Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices", Armstrong and her research team are searching for ways to enable residents and care providers to flourish in long-term residential care settings and to ensure they are treated with dignity and respect. With $2.5M in funding from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Major Collaborative Research Initiatives program, the project is organized around four central but overlapping themes: approaches to care, work organization, accountability strategies, and funding as well as ownership structures. The team, which consists of 26 academics from six countries (Canada, US, UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany), five union and two employer organizations partners, along with more than 40 students and four post-doctoral fellows, has been doing analytical mapping of services in all the countries involved and has conducted 25 rapid-site switching ethnographies.

Armstrong is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has held a Canadian Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Health Services and Nursing Research. She served as the Chair of the Women and Health Care Reform group funded by Health Canada, was co-director at York of the Ontario Training Centre, and has served as both Chair of the Department of Sociology at York and Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. She is also a board member of the York Institute for Health Research, the Global Labour Research Centre, the Canadian Health Coalition and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Armstrong has served as acting Director of the National Network for Environments and Women’s Health. In addition, she has served as an expert witness in more than a dozen cases, heard before bodies ranging from the Federal Court to Human Rights Tribunals on issues related to women’s health care work and to pay equity.

For more information on Armstrong’s research, please visit her website.