Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

There is a paucity of health research infrastructure overtly designed to serve rural, remote, and Indigenous communities in Canada. The purpose of this planning grant is to develop a long-term, Indigenous co-designed, evaluative research agenda that is focused on integrating Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility (IDEA), and intergenerational sustainability values into health research infrastructure design, development, and operation. Established research collaborations and partnerships provide context for the design of our planning grant, which is guided by relationships that are culturally safe, and informed, from its outset by principles of Indigenous and Indigenist research methodologies, integrated Knowledge Translation, and Knowledge to Action Research. The key question guiding this work is: What are the optimal ways to design health research infrastructure, to overcome inequities and meet the priorities of diverse Indigenous, rural, remote, and northern communities? To address this question, our three interrelated objectives are to synthesise knowledge, learn from practice-based experience and explore emerging scholarly innovations relevant to the design of health research infrastructure for northern, rural, and remote contexts. Our planning grant team reflects core commitments to Indigenous engagement, to gender equity, to involvement of a range of equity-seeking groups and will address our question and objectives through two concurrent, and interrelated knowledge synthesis pathways: scoping review of the published literature, and scoping conversations to learn from and with knowledge-holders. This collaborative planning process will offer an essential foundation for developing the longer-term research agenda of the emerging Northern BC Hub for Health Research and share insights to strengthen research in other northern and Indigenous contexts.