Dr. Bruce Wallace
Bruce Wallace is a scientist with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and a professor with UVic's School of Social Work and the Co-Chair of the Pacific Housing Research Network (PHRN). His research focuses on substance use and harm reduction, poverty and homelessness and access to health care, including dental care. He is an engaged scholar with many years of community-based research in Victoria employing health equity and social justice approaches to his projects. He was recently awarded the Victoria Community Leadership Award and the University of Victoria Provost’s Advocacy and Activism Award.
Bruce’s research has been responsive to the illicit drug overdose emergency in BC as he co-leads several research initiatives including analysis of the implementation and impacts of the novel overdose prevention sites established in Victoria BC and a drug checking pilot project and evaluation. Bruce teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate social work program, currently teaching policy and research courses.
Projects
- BC Co/Lab
- Disseminating drug checking results in response to the overdose crisis
- Drug Checking: A new tool in the toolbox
- Drug checking: Engaged research on implementations in response to overdose
- Drug checking: Enhancing scalability to effect systems change
- Drug user knowledge and drug checking evidence: Knowledge synthesis actions to reduce overdose in Island Health
- Equity lens in public health (ELPH) reducing health inequities: The contribution of core public health services in BC
- Feasibility check: Expansion of drug checking to reach people who use alone and reduce overdose in private residences
- Implementing innovations in drug checking: A harm reduction pilot in response to illicit drug overdose
- Integrating a low-barrier drug checking platform into public health responses to overdose
- Managed alcohol and cannabis substitution: A feasibility study
- Preventing and reducing harms of substance use in homeless shelter programs
- Reducing Stigma in Primary Care
- Spectroscopy for the masses: Training the community to operate drug-checking technologies as a response to the overdose crisis
- Vancouver Island Drug Checking Project
Publications
- A distributed model to expand the reach of drug checking
- Approaches to evaluation of homelessness interventions
- A strategy for the detection of benzodiazepine drugs using low-resolution paper-spray mass spectrometry for harm reduction drug checking
- Beyond a spec: assessing heterogeneity in the unregulated opioid supply
- Critical considerations for the practical utility of health equity tools: a concept mapping study
- Death is a social justice issue: Perspectives on equity-informed palliative care
- Disruption as opportunity: Impacts of an organizational health equity intervention in primary care clinics
- Enhancing equity-oriented care in psychedelic medicine: Utilizing the EQUIP framework
- Evaluation of a Drug Checking Training Program for Frontline Harm Reduction Workers and Implications for Practice
- Every Washroom: De facto consumption sites in the epicenter of an overdose public health emergency
- Everywhere and for everyone: proportionate universalism as a framework for equitable access to community drug checking
- Evidence brief: Harm reduction implementation framework (HRIF)
- Evidence Brief: Needle and Syringe Exchange Programs
- Factors Associated with Nonfatal Overdose During a Public Health Emergency
- Factors associated with public injection and nonfatal overdose among people who inject drugs in street-based settings
- Fentanyl detection and quantification using portable Raman spectroscopy in community drug checking
- Health equity-oriented approaches to inform responses to opioid overdoses: a scoping review protocol
- How Equity-Oriented Health Care Affects Health: Key Mechanisms and Implications for Primary Health Care Practice and Polic
- Impact of overdose prevention sites during a public health emergency in Victoria, Canada
- Implementing an integrated multi‐technology platform for drug checking: Social, scientific, and technological considerations
- Not just fentanyl: Understanding the complexities of the unregulated opioid supply through results from a drug checking service in British Columbia, Canada
- Sheltering risks: Implementation of harm reduction in homeless shelters during an overdose emergency
- The implementation of overdose prevention sites as a novel and nimble response during an illegal drug overdose public health emergency
- The potential impacts of community drug checking within the overdose crisis: qualitative study exploring the perspective of prospective service users
- Third party drug checking: accessing harm reduction services on the behalf of others
- Toward automated infrared spectral analysis in community drug checking
- Turning a blind eye: implementation of harm reduction in a transitional programme setting
- Victoria Cool Aid Society Community Health Centre: Social, political, and historical context
- Visioning Towards a Decolonized, Indigenous- Centered Service Model for Drug Checking: An Auto-Ethnographic Exploration
- What is needed for implementing drug checking services in the context of the overdose crisis? A qualitative study to explore perspectives of potential service users
- Where’s the Housing? Housing and Income Outcomes of a Transitional Program to End Homelessness
- “Just too busy living in the moment and surviving”: barriers to accessing health care for structurally vulnerable populations at end-of-life