May 30, 2017
Congratulations to our PhD student, Taq Bhandal, for receiving a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Award: Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships in the amount of $105,000! Dr. Annette Browne serves as Taq’s supervisor.
The CIHR Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships Doctoral Awards has the objectives to provide recognition and funding to students early in their academic research career, providing them with an opportunity to gain research experience, as well as to provide a reliable supply of highly skilled and qualified researchers.
This funding will go towards Taq’s project: “Laying the foundation for innovative and equitable health systems: integrating critical pedagogy in health professional education”.
Project abstract: Health professional education (HPE), an upstream element of our health system, is understudied and few effective reforms have been made in recent years. While there are notable pockets of innovation the uptake of health equity perspectives in HPE has been limited. The aim of the project is to understand if and how curriculum designers, teachers, and administrators in HPE take up critical advancements in critical theories of racialization (including Indigenous decolonial theory, intersectionality, postcolonialisms, critical race theory, and planetary humanisms) when preparing students for practice. Analysis of the data collected in this study will inform the development of a pedagogical framework, constructed with input from the MedNurs community and practice guidelines from HPE and higher education literature. The findings, framework, and subsequent knowledge translation will impact our collective goal of reducing health inequity experienced by vulnerable populations in Canada and beyond. Policy-makers and educators will use the results of this project to increase the capacity of emerging health professionals to attend to global inequities that cut across race, Indigeneity, socio-economic class, sex/gender, ability and other social relations.
To learn more about Taq and her research visit her GRSJ profile: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/person/taq-bhandal/, her website: taqbhandal.com, or her Twitter @bhantaq.
