Grant: Project Grant - PA: Research in First Nations, Inuit and/or Métis Health

Using social justice, feminist, interdisciplinary, Indigenous-informed methodologies in health system-transformation activist-research, and anchored in anticolonial qualitative methods, H.E.A.R.T. Medicine builds on evidence from previous successful critical medical humanities CIHR grants: the broadest goal of H.E.A.R.T. Medicine is transforming healthcare in Canada by 1) igniting and sustaining national conversations about the cruciality of critical anticolonial health humanities to health and medicine, and 2) developing and creating evidence about open access anticolonial health humanities curricular materials for Canadian medical education programs. H.E.A.R.T. Medicine is anchored in CIHR's uptake of interdisciplinary research and its focus on achieving quadruple aim goals for improving health equity. A knowledge creation and mobilization project, H.E.A.R.T. Medicine aligns with commitments by the Institute for Indigenous Peoples Health to improve Indigenous well-being and with mandates by the Institute of Health Service and Policy Research to support innovative research, capacity-building, and knowledge translation initiatives designed to improve Canadian health and quality of life. Despite increasing global scholarship on the astonishingly positive impacts of arts and humanities practices and pedagogies in medical education and healthcare, health humanities have never been methodically researched in Canada as possible antidotes to systemic sociocultural/health inequities. Drawing on leading national and international evidence, and working in an interdisciplinary fashion, Indigenous and settler members of H.E.A.R.T. Medicine will infuse, document, analyze, and translate evidence about what happens when critical anticolonial health humanities scholarship enters medical education systems across Canada and when arts and humanities sit alongside biosciences to better train and support tomorrow's health and medical professionals to care for patients and each other.