Nova Scotia·NewA retired prenatal researcher has donated $2 million to expand research on women’s health and support the IWK Health Centre’s goal to improve health-care outcomes for women. ‘Women are in huge need of help,’ says retired researcher Margaret OultonListen to this articleEstimated 3 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence.From left, IWK Foundation president and CEO Jennifer Gillivan, donor and researcher Margaret Oulton, Charlie Livingstone, and Accelerate Research Chair Justine Dol. (Giuliana Grillo de Lambarri/CBC)A retired prenatal researcher has donated $2 million to expand research on women’s health and support the IWK Health Centre’s goal to improve health-care outcomes for women.The donation was announced Thursday by the IWK Foundation, which supports the Halifax hospital that treats women and children in the Maritimes. Margaret Oulton, a former Dalhousie University professor and researcher at the Grace Maternity Hospital in Halifax, said she first considered donating the money to the IWK’s department of obstetrics and gynecology since her own work had been in that field. But after meeting with representatives from the IWK Foundation, she decided that donating the money for women’s research specifically would be the best way to help her community. “I’m very happy for what [the donation]’s able to do, that it’s helping women. Women are in huge need of help,” she said. This comes as the IWK Foundation pushes for more emphasis on women’s health, through a first-of-its-kind survey of 27,000 women about their experiences with the health-care system in the Maritimes, and its new Accelerate Research Chair in Women+ Health. Justine Dol, a researcher at the IWK and the inaugural research chair, says the donation will help set the foundation for future studies, adding that women’s health has been underfunded for decades. “It gives dedicated funding and support for this in an environment where only seven per cent of national research funding has focused on women’s health,” said Dol. Oulton said she originally received the money as a gift herself and decided to donate the amount in full to the hospital foundation. Charlie Livingstone met Margaret Oulton for the first time Thursday, 21 years after her research helped his safe premature delivery. (Giuliana Grillo de Lambarri/CBC)Oulton’s life workAfter receiving her PhD in biochemistry at Dalhousie in 1975, Oulton became involved in prenatal research for the Grace, which was later integrated into IWK Health. In her time there, Oulton’s team made a groundbreaking discovery that helped determine if the lungs of an unborn infant were sufficiently developed to endure induced premature birth in a high-risk pregnancy.That discovery led to the safe delivery of more than 10,000 babies in Atlantic Canada in a span of 20 years, the IWK Foundation said.One of those babies was Charlie Livingstone, now a 21-year-old student at Dalhousie. In 2004, he was born more than four months before his due date and weighed only one pound five ounces. “My parents described me about the size of a cellphone with arms and legs,” Livingstone said at Thursday’s announcement, where he met Oulton for the first time.Thanks to Oulton’s work, he was able to survive and live a “normal life,” said Livingstone, who described their meeting as a “full circle moment.”MORE TOP STORIESABOUT THE AUTHORGiuliana is a journalist originally from Lima, Peru. She is interested in stories about rural Nova Scotia, science, the environment and more. If you have any story tips, you can reach her at giuliana.grillo.de.lambarri@cbc.ca.
IWK receives $2M to expand womens health research
