Webinar Spotlights UB’s Pan-American Collaboration

PAHO is the specialized health agency of the Inter-American System and WHO’s Regional Office for the Americas, working with countries throughout the region to improve and protect people's health. The Center on Health in Housing is a collaboration between SPHHP and the School of Architecture and Planning, administered by SPHHP’s Office of Global Health Initiatives.

The recent webinar, “Housing and Health: Implications for Health Equity", featured center faculty member Elizabeth Bowen, PhD, LCSW, associate professor in the School of Social Work, and Meghan Holtan, a PhD candidate in urban and regional planning. The two highlighted challenges around housing and health in the Americas region from PAHO’s perspective, offering a look at the concept of housing as a key social determinant and its direct and fundamental relationship with health equity.

Holtan detailed five factors in the relationship between housing security and health: the physical condition of housing, residential stability, housing affordability, location and the surrounding environment, and the opportunities for care and social connections that housing often provides.

Bowen advocated housing as a human right and cited a 2022 study indicating that only 44 percent of 189 United Nations member countries had the constitutional right to housing in 2020.

Other speakers during the webinar represented a range of regional perspectives from Guatemala, Argentina and other countries in the Americas, as well as from PAHO.

“One thing that stands out to me from the webinar,” said Bowen, “was that … some presenters presented in English and some presented in Spanish, while interpreters offered live translations via Zoom into the audience member’s first language. This was my first time presenting this way, and it made a really positive impression. It provided a seamless way of being able to interact with the other speakers and audience members across languages and cultures.”

Holtan seconded Bowen's comment about working with and learning from colleagues across the Americas: “One thing that I appreciated about one of the other presentations from the webinar was the open acknowledgement of the political drivers of social determinants of health, such as housing." 

In 1988, UB’s Center on Health in Housing became a PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on Healthy Settings, and the cross-border work began.

Via the collaborating center, faculty from across UB have shared—and continue to share—with PAHO their expertise on accessible housing, environmental exposures, food systems and healthy neighborhoods.

“I have enjoyed working with colleagues from PAHO, WHO, and other collaborating centers in Pan-America. Some of our UB members were involved in developing housing-related guidelines and providing technical reports,” said Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health Lina Mu, MD, PhD, who along with Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, PhD, co-directs UB’s collaborating center.

“We felt UB’s expertise was well recognized and being utilized to contribute to regional and global health.”