Studying Perinatal Well-being

Helping patients make decisions about treatment during the perinatal period is a critical process for the birth person and their provider. Dr. Simone Vigod, MD, explains how her team developed a patient decision aid. Dr. Vigod also shares the research benefits of large datasets.

Dr. Simone Vigod (MD 2003, FRCPC 2009) is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Women’s College Hospital, one of the University of Toronto’s nine fully affiliated academic health sciences centers. Dr. Vigod is a leading expert in perinatal mood disorders and has conducted some of the largest studies worldwide on maternal mental illness around the time of pregnancy. Mental illness at this life stage poses unique risks to mothers and their children at a critical juncture in both of their lives. Her research is helping raise awareness about gaps in access to specialized perinatal mental healthcare and identifying vulnerable populations where these gaps are most prominent. She also designs and evaluates novel health system interventions to improve access to and care uptake for affected women. Dr. Vigod leads a clinical research program at Women’s College Hospital as a Senior Scientist and the Shirley A. Brown Memorial Chair in Women’s Mental Health Research at the Women’s College Research Institute. She is a Senior Adjunct Scientist at ICES in Toronto, Ontario, where population-level administrative health data for her epidemiological studies are securely held.