About H.E.A.L. Healthcare
Hearts-based Education and Anti-colonial Learning in Healthcare (H.E.A.L. Healthcare)
Longstanding and well-established health disparities exist because of racist, colonial, able-ist, geographic, economic, and gendered inequities. Our team believes arts and humanities have an unrealized potential to disrupt these inequities. The H.E.A.L. Healthcare project brings together artists, writers, activists, and people with lived experience to create arts-based anti-oppression learning materials for healthcare educators, professionals, and practitioners wanting to address biases and ‘-isms’ that permeate healthcare systems and culture. This arts-based online learning resource was built using a decolonizing approach by the H.E.A.L. team.
Our work begins from the premise that healthcare is both an art and a science, and that the Health and Medical humanities are growing interdisciplinary fields bringing together health and medical sciences with arts to make actionable change. The H.E.A.L. Healthcare project provides a platform for healthcare professionals to take action to decolonize their practice, using arts as a mechanism for change.
H.E.A.L. Healthcare is a result of a long-standing collaboration between the Health Arts Research Centre (HARC) and the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health (NCCIH) at the University of Northern British Columbia on the unceded traditional territories of the Lheidli T’enneh in the northcentral geographies of colonial British Columbia.
The Logo
Created by Lisa Boivin, the H.E.A.L. Healthcare logo represents the goals of the project through its use of symbols and rich colours.
The Clipboard represents informed consent, the most sacred ceremony process between clinician and patient. Informed consent is a non-hierarchal relationship in which both parties come together to focus on the medicine-journey.
The Hawk Feather is a ceremonial tool. The Hawk Feather reminds us to communicate clearly, with kindness and love.
The Clipboard and Hawk Feather rest in a garden of Beaded Flowers, symbolic of wanting our work to be reflective and respectful of Indigenous identity.
Together we are growing a garden of wellness that flourishes with Indigenous wellness practices.
The Cedar Basket
Handmade by Tsimshian Knowledge Keeper X’staam Hana’ax (Nicole Halbaur), every strip of cedar is unique, strong, and versatile on its own. Cedar does not mould or rot. Woven together the individual strands can carry many objects, ideas, and, beliefs for many cultures.
In Tsimshian culture, a woven cedar basket is used to carry important names, knowledge and cultural practices. Like this cedar basket, the strands of learning found within the H.E.A.L. Healthcare Learning Resource intersect and weave a pathway and experience unique to each individual. Working through the individual curricula will allow you to explore yourself and our world. The new knowledge and perspectives you gain are to be carried within your own cedar basket of learning, and then shared to improve practice and patient health outcomes. Working just a bit differently can provide a big benefit.
Funders
The H.E.A.L. Healthcare Project is generously supported by the following institutions:
