Grant: Health System Impact Emb. Early Career Res. Award - Indigenous Peoples' Hlth

The toxic drug and overdose crisis remains a serious challenge for health systems in British Columbia (BC), especially in northern, rural, and remote regions. Northern Health (NH) experiences the highest overdose-related death rates in the province, with First Nations people and First Nations women disproportionately affected. These inequities are shaped by geography, colonial harms, barriers to care, and broader social conditions. Despite this, the voices and experiences of northern and Indigenous communities, and of people who use drugs, are missing from the evidence used to design mental health and substance use care. To address these gaps, we will embed lived and living experience and Indigenous perspectives directly into health system learning and improvement. Our project will establish a Northern Health Equity Learning Community (NHELC) that will bring together people with lived and living experience of drug use, Indigenous partners, health care providers, trainees, community organizations, health system leaders and researchers to improve how knowledge is generated, valued, and applied within NH. Using storytelling, Sharing Circles, interviews, journey mapping, and arts-based methods, our research will document real-world experiences of care across diverse northern communities and identify where current systems create barriers or cause harm. We will analyze findings collaboratively and apply them to co-design, test, and refine equity-oriented, culturally safe mental health and substance use care pathways. Our project will also develop practical measures to support implementation and ongoing improvement. By embedding this project within NH, needed changes can be implemented more quickly, strengthening NH's capacity to respond to the evolving toxic drug and overdose crisis by expanding equity-oriented care pathways and improving access to culturally safe mental health and substance use care for northern and Indigenous communities in BC.