Catherine Binda receives CCYC Program/Intervention Poster Award
Photo: Executive members from the 2021-22 UBC Medicine Refugee Health Initiative from left to right: Catherine Binda, Bader Al Zeer, and Nikita Menon
Catherine Binda, MD Candidate in the Department of Medicine at The University of British Columbia, has received the “program/intervention award” for her poster at the Canadian Children, Youth and Communities (CCYC) Health In | Equity Conference on December 6. She and her team provide a summary of her poster presentation.
The Refugee Health Initiative (RHI) Program was created in 2016 in response to the Syrian refugee resettlement initiative in Canada. Our program aims to help refugee families settle in their new communities while fostering cultural competency among medical students (Liu et al. 2022). RHI has three branches, including: the reciprocal mentorship program, outreach, and research and innovation. The reciprocal mentorship branch pairs 1-2 medical students with a resettled refugee family. Pairs complete 1-2 home/virtual visits per month for two years. During 2021-2022, 18 refugee families (80 individuals including 42 children <18 years) were each connected with a medical student and an interpreter to create an opportunity for reciprocal mentorship. Refugee families benefit from the program as they are able to access support from English speaking medical students as they navigate the Canadian housing, education, and healthcare systems, and labour market. Last year, students assisted families with activities like housing applications, scheduling medical appointments, applying for jobs, using the public transit system, locating playgrounds, registering for English language classes, and finding affordable dental care.
Medical students benefitted from the RHI Program by learning about resiliency and barriers to care, and by practicing their English communication skills with an interpreter. RHI’s outreach branch focuses on working with community partners to identify priority topics and create workshops to address the identified knowledge gap. In 2021-2022, 5 context-specific health presentations, featuring topics like mental health and diabetes care, were shared with 5 language groups. Participating in outreach presentations lead to valuable discussion about how language frames our understanding of disease and lead to a greater appreciation for the role of translators in clinical settings.
The next step is to initiate three research projects related to quality improvement and quality assessment of the RHI program. These projects are currently in the design phase.
Learn more about the RHI Program here.
Question: What does winning this award mean to you?
Answer: The RHI team is honored to have been recognized with the Leong Research Award. We would like to thank the selection committee and each of the conference organizers and participants at the 2022 Canadian Children and Youth and Communities conference. Winning this award is particularly meaningful to the Refugee Health Program (RHI) community as we hope to draw attention to the needs of equity-deserving communities and share a framework for reciprocal mentorship and advocacy that may be replicated in other centers across Canada.
View the poster presentation here.