More About Laura

Laura’ s clinical work as a social worker and her research work with vulnerable populations, particularly children, has led to her interest in advancing health equity and engaging in social action. She considers herself to be an optimistic academic, scholar and activist.

Over the years, her academic and research work has included: overseeing large scale projects, conducting multi-site research studies and engaging in knowledge translation strategies. Her research has focused on the experiences of health care providers caring for children with life limiting illnesses along with the complexities that families and children experience (hope, well siblings, and father’s grief for examples).  Her work has included broad initiatives such as developing a provincial network of researchers, clinicians, policy makers and parents with an aim of focusing on paediatric palliative and end-of-life care research and advocacy initiatives, co-authoring national pediatric hospice guidelines, and contributing to the Ontario government’s influenza pandemic plan. More recently, her research has focused on the intersection between health and social action and she is more engaged in exploring the impact of social determinants of health on health equity, access and outcomes.

She completed her Masters of Social Work at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto in 1991 and a Research Diploma in Social Work from the University of Toronto in 2001. Her thesis work was focused on developing family centered care initiatives in paediatric health care, specifically exploring the implementation of a hospital based parental presence at induction program with the goal of helping children better cope during procedures requiring anesthesia.

She has been widely published in academic journals and is frequently sought out as a key presenter and speaker at national and international academic conferences.

Laura is often invited to review grants and manuscripts within the academic community related to children’s health and palliative and end-of-life care. As well, she has mentored and supervised many graduate and post graduate students from various health disciplines.

To find out more about Laura’s work at SickKids please go to:  (http://www.sickkids.ca/AboutSickKids/Directory/People/B/Laura-Beaune-staff-profile.html).

Volunteering

Outside of academia, Laura is also engaged in her community  through volunteerism.

 She is a community reviewer with MusiCounts, a not for profit Canadian agency that provides funding for music within public schools (http://www.musicounts.ca/). 

Laura is an active volunteer within the public education system in Toronto, Ontario. She has held various school council executive roles within neighbourhood elementary and secondary schools.

As well, she spent many years volunteering along with other professionals, burn survivors and community members creating and running a camp for young burn survivors known as Camp BUCKO (http://www.campbucko.ca/). Camp BUCKO continues to be a very dynamic organization to this day and has just recently celebrated its 20th year.