May 9, 2024 | Yahoo News via UVic News
Lisa Bourque Bearskin and Victoria Dick of Tseshaht are working to change the way that health care is delivered in Indigenous communities. Recognizing the colonial foundation that the current Canadian healthcare system is based on, Bourque Bearskin and Dick are creating a curriculum called the Indigenous Graduate Education and Nursing (IGEN) program at UVic.
Stated on the IGEN website, the IGEN program’s aim is to “support the development of wise practices in nursing, specifically to improve the health of Indigenous Peoples through educational research.”
As Bourque Bearskin explained to Yahoo News, they are attempting to “rewrite nursing back into healthcare [and] into the history.” This is because nurses are the ones that are consistently working with people and communities directly, however, they are often left out of the decision making process.
Dr. Lisa Bourque Bearskin from Beaver Lake Cree Nation, is an associate professor within the faculty of Nursing, as well as an inaugural Canadian Institute of Indigenous Health Research Indigenous Health Nursing Chair holder at the University of Victoria. Her areas of expertise include, but are not limited to Indigenous health nursing knowledge, Indigenous health rights, cultural safety, cultural security, and cultural humility.
To read more about Dr. Bourque Bearskin’s work in this field, we encourage you to check out her author page on our institutional repository, UVicSpace! Or, if you are interesting in learning more about the nursing curriculum, try searching for “nursing education” in the browse by subject option!
