Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

If you go to the doctor with a problem and the doctor tells you there is nothing wrong, you might feel rejected and misunderstood. Maybe in your community there is no other doctor to go to, so next time you are ill you decide not to go to the doctor at all, making things worse. Unfortunately, this situation is common in many parts of Canada. Our health care systems assume disease is the cause of illness. However, there is more than one way to understand health and health care. My research will help to build a health care system that learns from our different understandings, and constantly improves to provide better care. Many Indigenous peoples do not see health as an absence of disease, but as the result of good relationships with their family, community, environment, and spirit. The differences between these beliefs and the beliefs of our health care system mean that Indigenous patients often receive unhelpful, and even harmful, care. One idea is to build "learning health systems" that continuously improve care by learning from a variety of information sources, including patients. To improve care for Indigenous patients, learning health systems must know what to learn, how, and from whom. My analysis braids together Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing to build a better understanding of what a learning health system is. My results suggest that meaningful engagement with Indigenous knowledge holders is necessary for health systems to learn. Built on respectful relationships, the learning health system could be developed as a system to improve healthcare for Indigenous patients and all Canadians.