HSE ROUNDS
Fiona Webster, PhDÂ
Western University, Associate Professor, Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing
June 1, 2023 4:00 - 5:30
Preparing future health care professionals to encounter patients from marginalized groups: reflections from a program of study on chronic pain
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Fiona Webster is a sociologist, ethnographer and Professor in the Labatt Family School of Nursing at Western University. She has successfully led many interdisciplinary research teams and is principal investigator of several CIHR funded studies using institutional ethnography to explore the social organization of care for people with situated experience of chronic pain and marginalization (COPE I and II and an extension study set in the context of the pandemic). She is also the Director of a nationally funded SSHRC Partnership grant ("PEPR Partnership"), which focuses on meaningful engagement with people living with chronic pain and social marginalization.
Abstract:
People with situated experience (PWSE) of chronic pain who also manage marginalization due to systemic inequities often feel stigmatized and misunderstood by care providers with the social context of their lives ignored. At the same time many care providers have described feeling overwhelmed by these patients and sometimes judgmental of their situations. The question of how to develop health professions education (HPE) to manage these issues, largely discussed under the rubric of the social determinants of health, has long plagued education and practice. Drawing on our own work, and that of other scholars, we look at how findings from critical sociology can be better integrated into education scholarship with the goal of addressing some of the many systemic issues of racism and poverty that patients live and health providers encounter.