"When we look at the societal discourse around neurodevelopmental disabilities, like autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and so on, there's a lot of blame. There's a lot of trying to understand the causes. Yet there's little discourse around family circumstances, and the ways we can help families access the services and supports they need."
Dr. Matthew Stackhouse is the University of New Brunswick's newest Purdy Crawford/Stephen Jarislowsky Postdoctoral Fellow in Health Policy. He's using data to help people access the care and support they need for their children.
We sat down with him to discuss his story, his research and how he wants to make life better for New Brunswickers.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I was born and raised in New Brunswick. I completed my undergraduate degree, a bachelor of arts with honours in sociology, here at UNB in 2017. It was there that I realised the power sociology has in terms of understanding the inequalities that different populations face and how that translates into health disparities.
After my undergraduate degree, I went to Western University, where I completed my PhD. I chose Western because they had a specialisation in health inequality and the quantitative methods needed to study it. My research focused on the intergenerational transmission of health inequality, though I always had an interest in barriers to healthcare access an interest I didn't yet have the tools or data to pursue.
My whole rationale for pursuing this career and going to Western was to gain expertise that I could bring back to my home province and ultimately use it to improve the health and social conditions for people here.
After finishing my PhD, I had the opportunity to put my research interests into practice when I joined DataNB's Monitoring, Evaluation and Knowledge Transfer Unit (MEKTU), working on Healthy Seniors Pilot Project evaluation.
That led to this postdoctoral fellowship, where I now work with my supervisor, Dr. Neeru Gupta.
What will you be working on during your fellowship?
My research focuses on the intersection of socioeconomic disadvantage and neurodevelopmental conditions two challenges that when experienced together, can compound the barriers families face in accessing the supports they need.
I'm interested in learning more about what these families are up against. What are the consequences of this intersection for them? What barriers do they encounter accessing healthcare, education and social services? How do these translate into longer-term health and social outcomes?
Working with the administrative data stewarded by DataNB, we can track the trajectories that families and children follow over time sometimes across a decade or more. That longitudinal view lets us identify the critical moments where people fall through the cracks and see where timely supports could make a real difference.
Ultimately, I want to use those insights to help design a collaborative, integrated service framework. My goal is to bring together government departments across health, education and social services to identify strategies to better support families who too often navigate those systems alone.
Why does this research matter?
A medical diagnosis is often the gateway to educational accommodations and other supports that can meaningfully improve quality of life for children and their families.
But for families already experiencing socioeconomic insecurity, getting that diagnosis and accessing supports and services is far from straightforward.
Part of it is financial. Assessments can be expensive, and multiple service providers may need to be consulted at different steps of the process, from initial screening to tracking ongoing needs.
But the barriers go well beyond money. Families may lack the social networks that connect them to the right professionals. They may not know what services exist or feel confident advocating for their child within systems that can be intimidating to navigate. They may not have the informal support networks that make it easier to manage everything else along the way, such as taking care of other tasks or people.
These are the quieter, less visible forms of disadvantage, but they're just as consequential.
On top of that, the system itself doesn't make it easy. Supports and services are spread across multiple government departments, often with little coordination between them. It can feel very fragmented, and this leaves families needing to piece things together on their own during an already difficult time.
The consequences of a delayed diagnosis are serious and lasting. Children who don't get what they need early on enter school at a disadvantage relative to their peers, and that gap tends to widen over time. In more severe cases, the absence of support can have profound effects on a child's long-term health, education and economic prospects. This is one of the pathways through which disadvantage reproduces itself across generations.
What I'm focusing on is understanding how these barriers compound one another and identifying where we can intervene to change the trajectory. In other words, where are the gaps in how we support these families, and how do we build something better?
How does being at UNB help your research?
As the provincial data custodian, DataNB has access to an incredible breadth and depth of administrative data health, education, social services, demographic and more and we can follow that data over time and even across generations, all while protecting individual privacy. In most places, each dataset exists in one department or agency, and these groups often work independently of each other and don't, or can't, share data.
That means here in New Brunswick we can connect information across multiple government departments in ways that researchers in many other provinces aren't able to.
It lets us go beyond the surface and understand a person not as a data point, but as a real human being with their own unique life course, and to use that understanding to ask better questions and ultimately, inform better policy.
