A team in the Comox Valley has been working to understand and address the barriers faced by people when they visit the hospital.
Sharon Karsten, a professor at Vancouver Island University, and Christohper Hauschild, a Mitacs research fellow employed by VIU, are involved with Walk With Me, a community engaged research project. One of its aims is improving collaboration between community groups and the hospital, and addressing the stigma that people who use substances can face in hospital settings.
Hauschild and Karsten spoke with People First Radio about their work.
“People who use substances face stigma broadly in community, and that’s not new news,” said Hauschild.
“But I don’t think the average person necessarily thinks about the kinds of barriers folks face when they enter into emerge, for instance.”
Hauschild said there’s a spectrum of experiences people have reported after seeking care in the hospital.
“ Sometimes people said that they felt seen, that they felt heard, that they had their care needs addressed,” he said. “But it hasn’t been uncommon across different communities and different hospital sites we’ve worked in when engaging with community members who use substances to hear comments like, ‘I would rather die than access the hospital,’ which I think speaks volumes to the degree of stigma that people are feeling.”
One part of the project involves taking hospital staff members on story walks, where they hear recordings of autobiographical accounts of people with experience of substance use, recounted in different spaces in the community. They also hold strategic visioning sessions with hospital staff. Karsten says that in the last 6 months, they’ve engaged with more than 300 staff.
Karsten says its about normalizing care for people who use substances.
“When you can normalize care for people who use substances similar to cancer or diabetes…there’s a great power in that,” she said.
“That’s where I think systems change often starts is that normalization, and that process happens through kind of collective conversation.”
Cory Cliffe has been helping out with the Walk With Me project as a cultural safety coordinator.
He says a lot of people working in the healthcare system are burnt out.
“ With people stretched so thin, how do we get them additional training, sensitivity training?” he said. “I believe that’s one of the most important things that healthcare workers, especially frontline workers, you know, in the hospital, things like that, should be receiving on a regular basis.”
He says the work Walk With Me does on its story walks represents an example of what that training could look like.
“ We record the stories of people who are currently suffering in addictions or post addictions in recovery, and we utilize those stories to educate people who have no idea what it feels like, no idea what people go through on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
“It makes it easier to understand where people are coming from when they step through those doors into the emergency room or the clinic or whatever it may be.”
Cliffe spoke about the issue of stigma that people who use substances can face when they enter the hospital.
“It’s always a fine line because there are, of course, the people who like to take advantage of the system, and that’s unfortunate. But there’s a lot of people that currently suffer unnecessarily because of that stigma…It kind of leads me to a question of like, where is the balance between recognizing user activity and dealing with it in a different way…because even that person who goes into the hospital, looking to be able to take care of their substance needs still needs some kind of care. They’re not the addict that you kick out to the street. They’re not any less than anybody else. It’s just a different form of care that they need. I think if people could understand that, and that is their first go-to in their thought processing, would make a lot of change within the system.
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