Embracing collaboration for the next generation of health professionals
During our October study break, a group of faculty from 6 departments – Biomedical Laboratory Technology, Diagnostic Imaging, Radiation Oncology, Nursing, Physiotherapy Technology and Social Services – met to plan for a November 11th symposium, where their third-year students can learn with, from and about each other. The day is the result of a 2-year ECQ-funded Interprofessional Education
(IPE) project, led Tim Miller and Krista Bulow, both from Physiotherapy Technology, and Marie-Eve Dufour from Social Services, that aims to create spaces where meaningful interactions and solid relationships can develop to help graduating health professionals meet the challenges of working in a stressful, multidisciplinary environment. The focus of the group has been to foster among heath technology students a shared understanding of the concepts of collective care and collective competence and provide them with the tools to better manage workplace conflicts and prevent burnout.
Joining in the discussion were the co-founders of another ECQ-funded project, the Creative Collective for Change (CC4C), a para-academic initiative that seeks to engage the Dawson Community in participatory actions that explore our pressing social issues and inspire through the possibilities of making real change. The leads from the IPE and CC4C projects have been exchanging since the spring and sharing a growing conviction that together they would be able to create something impactful, potentially inspirational, for the students.
Our day began with a reading by Dawson theatre students Corbeau Sandoval Chaidoullina, Valerie Boisvert, Audrey-Shana Ferus, and Bryan Ku, who had brilliantly crafted a short skit taking place in a fast-food restaurant, that was designed to engage the students on the task of conflict resolution. The four characters included an authoritarian owner who was dealing with a broken relationship with his cook, the cook burying herself in work to avoid confronting personal problems, an ambitious employee, who was feeling unrecognized by her superiors, and a new, unprepared employee left on his own to manage the mass influx of hungry customers. As multiple conflicts broke out, the new worker’s pleas that “there must be a better way” went ignored and a mistaken order eventually led to disastrous results for a customer.
All of us present were engrossed in the skit and the human disaster unfolding before our eyes, recognizing immediately the rich material that would be offered to students as they tackled the questions of what caused the conflicts – each one easily transferable to healthcare environments – and explored how they could be resolved. At the symposium, these discussions will be guided by the expertise of Social Services teacher Rachel Deutsch, who will explore the different types of interpersonal conflicts, the barriers that prevent us from managing them well, and successful conflict resolution strategies. After this, multidisciplinary teams of students, led by two teachers collaborating across disciplines, will be asked to write their own skit that constructively resolves one of the many conflicts in the original skit. The takeaway, we hope, will be students more aware of the necessity of addressing conflict and collaborating to repair the harms they do.
For Cin-Com and Humanities teachers Kim Simard and Pat Romano of the Creative Collective for Change, there remained, though, an unaddressed conflict. They wondered how significant it was that the IPE group had selected a fast-food restaurant as a stand-in for our health care system. Why had no one raised the question about the relevance of this analogy when we heard the skit in the morning? Did this seem so fitting that it needed no comment? And, if indeed our health system sometimes provides health care in the form of a mass-produced, one-size fits all, cost-focused, and not too healthy burger, then what does this mean for our graduates and the dreams and ambitions they bring into their professional lives?
With these questions in mind, Kim and Pat addressed the health technology teachers, asking them what this implies for the concept of collective care. If the healthcare system – perpetually underfunded and lacking staff – puts health professionals at constant risk of burnout and patients too often at risk of sub-par care, then is there value in viewing their actual successes in providing real care as acts of resistance?
Before opening the conversation further, they presented a rich conception of resistance, drawing from the work of social scientist James Scott and social worker Allan Wade. This new perspective expands our idea of resistance to include the actions – often subtle and unknown to anyone but the resistor – that are taken to expose, withstand or oppose attacks on human dignity, as well as efforts to imagine a better alternative or redress harms done. All these often “small acts of living,” as Wade calls them, are at their essence expressions of dignity and agency – however limited their impact may be, and rooted in a desire for change. They ended with a quote by Indigenous writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who writes in her 2017 book, As We Have Always Done:
It became clear to me that how we live, how we organize, how we engage in the world – the process – not only frames the outcome, it is the transformation. How molds and then gives birth to the present. The how changes us…. If we want to create a different future, we need to live a different present, so that present can fully marinate, influence, and create different futurities.
Even though the session was now going over time, this idea of care as resistance opened up some powerful memories — the feelings of inadequacy when not being able to do enough to help a patient or client, the need to do more for patients yet at the same time knowing that working overtime was not a sustainable solution, the guilt that came and endured when the choice was made to leave the healthcare system and change profession, and the uncertainty about telling our students too much about the failings of the current system. At this point, it became clear to us all of the necessity of engaging graduating students in something that activated their own capacity to be agents for change, that sent them into their profession with the insight that the reality we are served is not necessarily the one we ordered.
With the meeting over, the IPE team -Tim, Krista and Marie-Eve – jumped right into an animated brainstorming session to finalize their plans for the symposium. They had now landed on the idea that it is more impactful to have the students experience the collaborative process than attempt to produce something collectively, and came up with the plan for each student to begin writing an acceptance speech for an “agents of change” award they will receive in the future from the Canadian Interprofessional Society. The students will be asked to identify the challenges they had faced in their professional roles and speak about how they managed them and why they had been nominated and ultimately won this prestigious award.
The goal shared by the teachers in both the IPE and CC4C projects is for students to leave the symposium with a shared sense that they had already begun to be “agents of change” in their future work settings, and that they can start implementing right away the things they touched upon throughout the day and ultimately in their acceptance speeches. This message will be reinforced in one last consolidation meeting, in which everyone together will be introduced to the idea of building on what they wrote in their speeches to create a manifesto. For the Creative Collective for Change, a manifesto is an ideal expression of critical hope — an outlook that offers a balance between realism and optimism, an understanding of the challenges that lie ahead, in this case a deeply rooted system that thrives on compliance and conformity yet embraces the potential for change. It is, we believe, a perspective of the world and one’s place within it that helps sustain our resilience, agency and capacity for collective care.
In our eyes, what a perfect collaboration of both project visions!
Submitted by: Pat Romano (Humanities), Tim Miller (Physiotherapy Technology), Krista Bulow (Physiotherapy Technology), Marie-Eve Dufour (Social Services), Kim Simard (Cimema-Communications)
