Bohdan Nosyk, an associate professor in health economics at SFU and a researcher at BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE), has been appointed BC’s first ever HIV/AIDS research chair in health economics. Nosyk leads research that seeks to discover efficient, cost-effective care for HIV/AIDS patients in BC.
His new role is part of a broader effort between St. Paul’s Hospital Foundation and BC-CfE to be at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS.
“We are now setting the health research agenda for the province in terms of HIV/AIDS,” said Nosyk. “We have a mandate to continually monitor the epidemic and watch how the money is being spent and the quality of care people are getting.”
The $3 million research chair position came out of the desire for BC-CfE, headquartered at St. Paul’s Hospital, to strengthen the work already being done on its Treatment as Prevention initiative. This program provides HIV testing and highly active anti-retroviral therapy [HAART] to patients.
BC-CfE research has shown that this initiative has resulted in a 90 per cent decrease in HIV-related morbidity and mortality since it was introduced in 1995, and the number of new HIV cases in the province has fallen dramatically.
“[Nosyk] has been responsible for helping develop approaches that will maximize the beneficial effects of available HIV interventions, and to ensure that we are doing everything that we can to contain the spread of HIV/AIDS,” said Irene Day, director of operations at BC-CfE. “I think that Dr. Nosyk in this chair is a tremendous asset to the province.”
Using mathematical models and world-class health services data, Nosyk has been able to show that the treatment scale-up of HAART in the province has been extremely cost-effective.
“It’s saved a lot of lives, prevented a lot of infections, and it’s going to continue to have an impact because the more people we get on treatment, the smaller the number of new cases that we see,” Nosyk said.
Through his teaching in health economics at SFU, Nosyk hopes to inspire students to get involved with scientists working with BC’s valuable health administrative data.
“The evidence that we’ve derived from the provincial health administrative data holdings has been put into practice, and it’s had a substantial public health benefit,” Nosyk said. “I think we’re only scraping the surface of what we can do with the amazing data resources we have in this province.”
This partnership extends beyond the three organizations involved. The work by Nosyk and his team of researchers will be communicated to policy-makers and caregivers working directly with patients.
They will also be working with HIV/AIDS programs and other harm reduction initiatives, such as methadone maintenance therapy for injection drug users, which indirectly targets and prevents the spread of the disease. Nosyk hopes to strengthen relationships with health authorities, the Centres for Disease Control [CDC], and Corrections BC.
“BC is a national leader in terms of how effective we’ve been at containing our HIV epidemic and continually driving down new cases of HIV,” explained Nosyk. “We’re now at a point where we’ve seen such progress that we have to be careful with how we spend the money that we have — and catch those last few cases and treat them effectively.”
“What we do here extends beyond BC, across Canada, and internationally,” said Nosyk. “The benefits of our research helps this province enormously, but goes beyond political borders.”
The benefits of our research helps this province enormously, but goes beyond political borders.