Projects

This research adopts a strengths-based approach to explore how 2S/LGBTQIA+ individuals and healthcare providers conceptualize and experience safe and affirming care in hospital-based settings.

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The specific objectives are to:

• Enhance conceptual understandings of safe and affirming care through the lens of individuals who receive and provide care in hospital-based settings.

• Illuminate how safe and affirming care contributes to health and well-being amidst historical and ongoing inequities faced by 2S/ LGBTQIA+ people.

• And ultimately draw on these insights to develop tangible tools and strategies for healthcare providers to enact safe and affirming care for 2S/LGBTQIA+ people.

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Interviews with both direct care nurses and members of the 2S/LGBTQIA+ community inform understandings of how safe and affirming care is conceptualized, enacted, and experienced. To augment this primary research, a scoping review is examining how safe and affirming care is defined and operationalized in the health research literature. Findings will be leveraged to develop knowledge mobilization materials for nurses and allied health care providers, towards further enhancing health system-wide capacity for safe and affirming care for 2S/LGBTQIA+ communities.

 

This study is funded through a CIHR Project Grand and an Island Health Seed Grant.

The aim of this project is to harness wisdom from successful collective action efforts during the HIV/AIDS crisis – specifically, the advocacy work of gay men, 2S/LGBTQIA+ community members and health providers – to make meaningful change to promote and protect the health of gay men. We seek to collect this knowledge to inform current advocacy efforts in response to the rise of discrimination targeted at 2S/LGBTQIA+ people.

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The specific objectives are to:

• Generate novel understandings of how community knowledge was integrated with overarching public health discourses to inform policies and laws

• Develop novel insights into how gay men and allies engaged in collective action towards redressing discrimination amidst the HIV/AIDS crisis

• Disseminate knowledge to community-based, institutional and academic audiences to provide deeper understandings of collective action and stimulate discussion on how allyship can redress discrimination and promote well-being for 2S/LGBTQIA+ people 

 

This project draws on intersectionality theory and Foucault’s theory of subjugated knowledges, within a constructivist grounded theory methodological approach. Focus groups engage gay men, members of the broader 2S/LGBTQIA+ community, and health care provider advocates who engaged in collective action during the pre-HAART era. 

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This project is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant.

This study aims to examine nursing students’ intersectional experiences of discrimination within their programs towards identifying strategies for redressing such experiences. 

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The specific objectives are to:

• Generate novel understandings of nursing students’ intersectional experiences of discrimination within their programs.

• Utilize these understandings to identify strategies for preventing and remediating discrimination across nursing programs.

• Integrate identified strategies into national accreditation standards and policy documents, to guide nursing programs’ prevention and remediation of discrimination among nursing students.

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We are conducting a national survey (available in English and French) among undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in any nursing program. Survey measures examine experiences of discrimination, alongside the context and setting of these experiences, through an intersectional lens. 

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This project is funded by a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant. 

This research project aims to enhance understandings of how nurses conceptualize and enact social justice within everyday nursing practices.

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Specific objectives are to:

• Establish a theoretically-grounded, empirically-informed Social Justice Framework through examining the intersections of how nurses conceptualize and enact social justice.

• Drawing on this Framework, advance guidance for embedding social justice within nursing work.

• Build the foundation for a robust program of research focused on enhancing nursing capacity for redressing structural inequities by enacting social justice.

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Towards these aims, a focused ethnographic approach will support examination of how nurses’ practices reflect social justice across diverse practice contexts with equity-owed groups. This study will produce a Social Justice Framework that will effectively integrate interdisciplinary theories of social justice with empirical knowledge of how nurses are conceptualizing and enacting social justice, to guide nurses and other health and social services providers in remediating structural inequities.

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This project is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant. 

 

This research project aims to explore the in-hospital experiences surrounding gender-affirming surgeries and the broader context of gender-affirming care systems within BC.

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The project draws on qualitative interviews with trans and non-binary people who have received gender-affirming surgery in British Columbia in the past 5 years. 

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Ultimately, this research strives to illuminate current gaps in gender-affirming practices within the health care system and produce further guidance for nurses and other health care providers in supporting trans and non-binary people during this process – particularly in the acute hospital setting.

The ‘Missing Middle’ phenomenon refers being too well for hospital and specialist services, yet too unwell for primary care alone – constituting a service gap often experienced by youth with mental health challenges.

 

This research partners closely with the BC Children's Hospital Missing Middle Team to examine the challenges and opportunities associated with mental health care for transition-aged youth in the missing middle, by exploring the experiences and perspectives of young people, their families, and mental health care providers.

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This project utilizes qualitative interpretive description to engage youth with lived experience, particularly focusing on three equity-owed groups: racialized youth; youth who use substances; and 2S/LGBTQIA+ youth.

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Additionally, family members of youth with mental health challenges, and mental health care providers, are engaged in focus groups and qualitative interviews to develop strategies and approaches for enhancing mental health systems towards closing the Missing Middle gap.

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This project is funded through the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation.

This research aims to explore how the practice of seclusion within inpatient mental health settings is experienced and perceived by both youth with lived experience, and mental health care providers. The project is conducted in partnership with the Island Health Mental Health and Substance Use Program, and Mental Health Recovery Partners – South Island, as well as a Peer Advisory Group who supports all project processes with lived expertise. 

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In Phase 1 of this project, youth with lived experience and health care providers engaged in individual interviews. Bringing together these perspectives, mental health providers, system leaders, and peers were engaged in a Collaborative Development Session, in which research insights were shared and robust discussion generated strategies for preventing the harms of seclusion. 

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Phase 2 of the project leverages the shared insights from the Collaborative Development Session to integrate novel strategies for mitigating the harms of seclusion, through a learning health system approach.

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This project was funded by an Island Health Equity Grant and a Michael Smith Health Research BC REACH Grant.

This feasibility study explored how a novel 2S/LGBTQIA+ Liaison Nurse role piloted within Island Health offered meaningful in-hospital supports and services to queer and trans people.

 

Multiple methods incorporated ethnographic observations of the Liaison Nurse's everyday work, alongside Daily Logs tracking key metrics related to populations served and supports provided. As this Liaison Nurse role was the first of its kind, research insights are informing future integration of similar roles into the health care system. 

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Additionally, an ongoing scoping review (see protocol paper here) is examining the current literature on similar navigator roles within the health care system for serving 2/SLGBTQIA+ communities. 

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This project is funded by a SSHRC Explore Grant and CIHR Project Grant.