Sarah de Leeuw had to check the calendar.
It's still six weeks until Christmas, but a whopper of a gift arrived for the UNBC assistant professor this week when it was announced she's been granted eight years of guaranteed funding to continue her aboriginal health research.
De Leeuw is the first northern B.C.-based researcher to receive a partnered scholar award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health.
Her research will focus on finding ways to apply fine arts and humanities to help train health professionals to understand health inequities and better connect with residents of smaller communities so health workers will be more inclined to stay.
"I believe that if undergraduate medical students with the Northern Medical Program can use writing or visual art to reflect on their profession, we might be able to lower rates of burnout," said de Leeuw.
"If we use the arts as a means to promote rural communities and actively partner health care professionals with the arts community, we will have a higher likelihood of recruiting and retaining them. The arts, in my mind, are an underutilized arena through which to address and solve some of the plaguing health inequities we live with in the Northern Health Authority."
The principles of narrative medicine are based on health care workers getting to know their patients and their medical histories in a holistic approach to health so they are better able to treat specific problems with patients. In her research, de Leeuw will investigate ways to stimulate patient-doctor dialogues through the use of storytelling, journal writing, poetry, reading, and even watching movies, which she says will help health care workers gain understanding and make them more responsive to the needs of patients.
The funding will cover the salaries of de Leeuw and a team of student researchers whose primary goal will be to find ways to resolve the health inequities of northern B.C. residents (aboriginal and non-aboriginal) as compared to residents of southern B.C. Research dollars are difficult to come by and de Leeuw says the award will present rare opportunities never before available to research students from northern B.C.
"This funding essentially flows through a partner's scholars award and what that means is I will invest in graduate researchers and graduate students and invest in community initiatives to undertake the kind of research my research agendas is built upon," said de Leeuw, who teaches Northern Medical Program courses in community connections and aboriginal wellness.
She plans to set up an advisory council comprised of indigenous and northern B.C. residents to guide the research agenda and ensure it is producing useful data for the health authority.
De Leeuw, 39, grew up in Duncan, Terrace and Haida Gwaii, and earned a graduate degree in cultural historical geography from Queen's University. Her 2011 book, Frontlines: Portraits of Caregivers in Northern British Columbia, is a series of photographs and biographical essays that highlight the work of health care professionals in northern B.C. cities. It identifies mentors working in those areas and brings their stories to life, and de Leeeuw sees the book as a recruitment tool for those cities, especially for graduating health care students.
"There's no need to look at the Northern Health Authority and the communities in northern B.C. through a deficit lens," de Leeuw said. "We need to start celebrating what exists here and the creative arts and humanities are a vital component of how to celebrate what exists here. That doesn't preclude also using the arts and humanities to think creatively and innovatively about new modes of teaching and practicing health care."
