We are pleased to announce that Dr. Julia Brandenberger recently received an early-career grant from the Department of Teaching and Research, Insel Gruppe AG in Switzerland, to fund her data linkage research project exploring migrant health equity from 2023-2025. Dr. Brandenberger is a Pediatrician specialized in pediatric emergency medicine from the University Children’s Hospital Bern in Switzerland, Clinical Fellow at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children.
The following is a summary of her new research project in Switzerland titled “Exploring migrant health equity in Switzerland – a data linkage project”.
My post-doctoral research in Toronto has allowed me to gain in-depth insight into the management and analysis of research data processed at ICES. Observing the way in which routine data evidence impacts the health of immigrants motivates me to apply the skills I have learned here back home, where the use and linkage of routine data in health care is still uncommon.
I was able to win this early-career grant from the Department of Teaching and Research at the University Hospital Bern, with the support of my supervisor and Co-Director of the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children, Dr. Astrid Guttmann, and Senior Research Associate and social epidemiologist, Dr. Susitha Wanigaratne. This award provides me with protected research time during the next two-years.
The project aims to identify ways to link Swiss health and governmental data on an institutional and national level. Its main goal is to understand important differences in the health care of pediatric migrants compared to other minors. On the institutional level, data from the University Children’s Hospital Bern will be linked to a governmental database available at the Federal Statistical Office using the Swiss social insurance number.
On the national level, data from the Swiss National Vaccination Coverage Survey from 2020 to 2022 will be linked to a subset of the governmental database using deterministic and probabilistic linkage techniques. The study will compare the differences in the measles vaccine uptake of pediatric migrants and other minors. This project will help to establish safe linkage techniques for health data in the Swiss context. These findings will provide an understanding of important health inequities for migrants living in Switzerland, and serves as a first step for a research framework ultimately aiming to improve pediatric migrant health care in the country.
I will rejoin the Pediatric Emergency Department of the University Hospital Bern in September 2023 as a level 1 staff physician; working half of my time in clinics and the other half in clinical research. I will continue to lead and strengthen the departments’ migrant health research group. I hope to intensify current collaborations with the migration and refugee unit of the hospitals’ adult emergency department, non-governmental organizations, the Federal Statistical Office, and ICES.
The Leong Fellowship has provided me with a value learning experience in Canada. It allowed me to dedicate 80% of my time to my work in pediatric migrant health and improve my academic performance. I am grateful to Dr. Astrid Guttman and the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children for supporting my academic endeavors, and enabling me to better serve the patient population I care deeply about.
Question: Will your project design have a potential to be used by other international institutions?
Answer: Yes. We are in the process of co-founding a Europe-wide working group in immigrant and refugee health under the umbrella of the European Academy of Pediatrics. Colleagues from Denmark, Netherlands, and Germany have shown a great deal of interest in this project. Once we have established our Europe-wide working group in one country, we plan to explore different options to realize similar projects at other European institutions. A long-term goal of this group is to develop a European-wide migrant health data network that improves the continuity of care for migrants across all European countries.
