Launching Canada’s first national surveillance system for perinatal opioid use

Dr. Andi Camden is an Epidemiologist and Senior Research Associate at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children. Andi has completed her postdoctoral fellowship and is launching a $1 million project to create a national surveillance system for perinatal opioid use, aiming to improve public health outcomes through comprehensive data integration and collaboration.

In August 2024, I successfully completed a two-year CIHR-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto and Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children. Over the past year, I have shared my research findings both nationally and internationally. This included publishing a paper titled Prescription Medication Use in Pregnancy in People with Disabilities: A Population-Based Cohort Study, presenting at the Canadian Perinatal and Child Health Annual Research meeting in Vancouver, and delivering two poster presentations at the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology annual meeting in Berlin, Germany. I am also scheduled to present on Trends in Pregnancy-Associated Opioid Toxicity and Mortality at the International Population Data Linkage Network conference in Chicago, U.S., this September. Stay tuned for more manuscripts!

Moving forward, I am grateful to continue working at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children with Dr. Astrid Guttmann as a Senior Research Associate. Together we will build upon our research on perinatal opioid use and its effects on pregnant individuals and their children, expanding our work to a national level.

I am excited to announce that Dr. Astrid Guttmann, Dr. Hilary Brown, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, and I have been awarded close to $1 million from the Public Health Agency of Canada. We will co-lead a project called the Pan-Canadian Perinatal Opioid Use Surveillance System. The initiative aims to develop a national public health surveillance system to monitor perinatal use and its impact on maternal and child health. It will be the largest data platform of its kind, linking opioid prescription records with physician outpatient visits, hospital and developmental records across five provinces: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan. Information generated from this project will address persistent public health surveillance evidence gaps and equip Canadians with the knowledge to address one of the most challenging modern public health issues. This surveillance tool will generate timely and accurate health data that can be used nationally, provincially, and locally to provide information on the scope and public health impacts of perinatal opioid use, and help create programs and services to improve health outcomes for those affected by perinatal opioid use and their children.

My team and I look forward to collaborating with co-investigators Dr. Tara Gomes (University of Toronto), Dr. Amy Metcalfe (University of Calgary), Dr. Jennifer Hutcheon (University of British Columbia), Drs. Lauren Kelly & Nathan Nickel (University of Manitoba), and Dr. Nazeem Muhajarine (University of Saskatchewan), in addition to people with lived and living experience, and knowledge users across Canada.