Catalyzing H.E.A.L Medicine – Fall Update

On March 1, 2022, HARC began work on a CIHR Quadruple Aims funded project called Catalyzing H.E.A.L. Medicine: Humanities Education and Anticolonial Learning for the Transformation of Medical Learning and Healthcare Delivery in Canada.  The objectives for the project are:

1. Produce a comprehensive, accessible, fully synthesized and analyzed repository of international knowledges and evidences about roles critical health humanities have played globally in mitigating health inequities.
2. Translate for Knowledge Users a synthesized and analyzed catalogue of international knowledge and evidence about the transformative potential of critical health humanities.
3. Create a map of gaps in international critical health humanities pertaining to decolonizing and anticolonial practice and evaluate room for improvement through adding Indigenous expertise and anticolonial theory about coloniality as a determinant of health.
4. Render resulting knowledge into usable information for influencers within Canadian medical and health education, Indigenous well-being, and patient and clinician quality improvement.
5. Disseminate new knowledges about the potential of critical health humanities in Canada, grounded in international evidence via (for example): online repositories and knowledge catalogues; academic publications; social media; lectures and teaching; community engagements.
6. Partner with all applicants and Knowledge Users, along with other expert collaborators, to (re)apply for a 2022 New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF-T) grant ($12 million) to further amplify and extend results of Catalyzing H.E.A.L. Medicine.

On September 27, the Catalyzing H.E.A.L. Medicine collaborators and Knowledge Users met online with HARC team members and Team Lead Dr. Darian Goldin Stahl for an update on the project.  It was exciting to learn about some of the preliminary findings of the research -for instance, that Canada is leading internationally in producing Indigenous focused topics in critical health humanities.  To date, deliverables 1-4 have been accomplished and we are excited to be working on disseminating articles on the project in Spring 2023.