Following the call for project 2010 of IReSP, we initiate a new project that aims to provide information to interventions seeking to reduce the prevalence of metabolic risk factors through the early detection of these risk factors and their medical control.

The objectives of the project are the following:

(i) examine whether there are disparities in the spatial accessibility to healthcare services in the study territory;

(ii) study social and spatial disparities in the biological screening of metabolic risk factors, medical follow-up, and access to recommended antihypertensive and lipopenic treatments;

(iii) explore the mechanisms contributing to these disparities by taking into account, in a multilevel perspective, factors related to the residential environment of participants, to the physicians and to their geographic context of practice, and to the individual level.

We gratefully thank INPES and IReSP, as well as CNAM-TS, for their support in this project.

The University of Montreal and Inserm are looking for a PhD candidate who will work on methodologies to measure and investigate individuals/environments interactions in relation to chronic diseases.

The doctorate will mainly take place in Montreal with periods of work in Paris with the RECORD Group. The candidate should have a Master in public health /epidemiology or in geomatics, and should have appreciable skills in statistical analysis. The student will be supervised by Yan Kestens (University of Montreal, Canada) and Basile Chaix (Inserm, France).

All details on this opportunity are reported in the attached document.

The RECORD group is preparing a project interested in the investigations of social and spatial disparities in healthcare utilization.

This project is based on the reimbursement data from the National Health Insurance System (SNIIR-AM) that have been merged to the RECORD database for each participant, after allowance from the National Data Protection Authority. These healthcare utilization data for the RECORD participants are exclusively manipulated at Inserm with a high degree of confidentiality.

Based on these healthcare utilization data merged to the RECORD database, the aim is to investigate social and spatial disparities in healthcare utilization that exist in the population. Do people from different neighborhoods have an equal access to preventive care? Are there barriers in the access to healthcare services such as specialty care in certain neighborhoods? In case of metabolic problems, e.g., hypertension, do people from different neighborhoods have comparable access to recommended medical treatments? Our aim will be to address these questions and others in our investigations of healthcare utilization behavior in the RECORD Study.