Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Internationally educated nurses (IENs) play a crucial role in addressing our national health human resource crisis. While prior Canadian research has captured the many challenges that IENs face, the current work context for IENs is distinct, and even more challenging (e.g. increasing violence against workers, higher levels of stress and burnout, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, etc.), and requires intervention. We will use this planning grant to bring together a team of researchers, knowledge users and IENs, and together we will co-design a solutions-oriented research study that seeks to understand, and then actively support, IENs' health and wellbeing. We will do so using a community-based participatory approach (CBPR). CBPR seeks to conduct research with community, in this case the community being IENs practicing in Ontario, and the professionals supporting them. Using a co-design approach, our planning and development work will include: Discovery, phase 1: virtual sessions with IENs, clinical educators and health care administrators/policymakers; Discovery, phase 2: virtual sessions with interdisciplinary researchers who have experience conducting research with/about IENs; and, finally, Co-Design, phase 3, a full-day, hybrid session. In this full-day session we will bring together participants from Discovery phases 1 and 2, share what we heard, refine our research question(s), and begin designing a research study. We will also use the final co-design event to recruit for an advisory board that will continue to meet after this 1-yr planning initiative. Our team has experience doing co-design work that has meaningfully engaged groups typically left out of research, and will do so again in this initiative. In addition to designing a specific study, these activities will bring together a team of researchers and partners who will work together on a longer-term program of research focused on the health and wellbeing of this healthcare workforce.