Congratulations to three of our colleagues for some exciting recognition and awards:
Brooke Cheng, MS4
Awarded the 2024 CAME Rising Star – Certificate of Excellence for valuable health professions scholarship within the Faculty of Medicine. Her leadership for a huge project mapping out the UBC UGME Palliative Care Curriculum with recommendations for improvements. As a result of this project, UBC Medical Students will have a more well-rounded education in palliative care. Additionally, she was an integral part of the Palliative Education Research Team for two residency scholar projects investigating medical student experience with goals of care discussions during clinical rotations. Those are but two of her many contributions to health professions scholarship!
Dr. Rachel Carter
Awarded the 2023 Michael Smith Health Research BC Convening and Collaborating (C2) Program Award to support C2 Project: Co-developing research priorities for improving palliative care for patients with advanced disease who also experience structural inequities.
Despite experiencing much higher death rates, people living with structural inequities are not adequately served by the current healthcare system, including by palliative care services. As a key provider of healthcare to people living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), Providence Healthcare’s (PHC) Division of Palliative Care is establishing a research program for equity-informed palliative care. The knowledge gained by this program will allow PHC to improve access to and quality of palliative care for patients with advanced disease who also experience structural inequities. To allow this research program to be truly patient centred, and ensure the experiences and perspectives of all relevant patient populations are prioritized, we will co-develop the research priorities with:
- people with lived experience of palliative care for people experiencing structural inequities (such as family/friend caregivers),
- people experiencing structural inequities who may need palliative care in the future,
- representatives from community-based organizations serving this population, and
- members of the healthcare system.
Dr. Eman Hassan
Awarded the 2023 Michael Smith Health Research Reach Award to support Reach Project (Principle Investigator): Fostering Grief and Bereavement Literacy in the Workplace for Those Who Serve People Experiencing Homelessness
Our recent research in BC shows that there is lack of grief support services available for people experiencing homelessness after they lose someone they care about. One common source of grief support for people experiencing homelessness are frontline workers. Yet, recent research found that frontline workers are commonly not provided grief support training, and their own work-related grief after a client dies is largely unsupported. In our survey of frontline workers in BC, almost all expressed a desire to increase their knowledge of grief.
Our project aims to improve grief knowledge and support skills for frontline workers who serve people experiencing homelessness. The project includes two steps: 1) Co-creating and testing an online grief education module and resources with a working group of community-based organizations, subject matter experts, and public partners; 2) Launching the developed module and resources through a symposium and exploring with experts in the field ways to make them more accessible for frontline workers. The ultimate goal of the project is to enhance the grief literacy for frontline workers and improve their abilities to provide better grief support to their clients who are experiencing homelessness.