Reconciling Relationships: A proof-of-concept RCT demonstrating novel tools to assess the outcomes of Indigenous cultural safety training programs

Presented by: 

• Dr. Janet Smylie, Director of Well Living House, Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair in Indigenous Health, and Indigenous Leadership Circle Member & Professor at DFCM, U of T 
• Dr. Billie-Jo Hardy, Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health
• Sam Filipenko, Research Manager 

Hosted by the MAP Centre, part of St. Michael’s Hospital – Unity Health Centre: The relationship between health care professionals (HCP) and Indigenous patients has been identified as a critical, necessary, and promising juncture for improving the health outcomes and healthcare access of Indigenous people. Since the release of the TRC’s Final Report, there has been a rapid increase in the number of cultural competency and cultural safety trainings offered to healthcare providers across Canada. However, there are gaps in the quality of the evaluations of these trainings, particularly with respect to patient-centred outcomes. These gaps in turn are linked to a paucity of patient-centred evaluation tools. In this presentation we will share the results of a recently completed three-arm randomized clinical trial that addressed the following objectives:

1. To compare the impacts of an intensive and a brief Indigenous cultural training to time-attention matched placebo on healthcare providers’ relational and clinical decision-making skills during simulated clinical encounters with Indigenous patients
2. To pilot new tools for measuring the impacts of cultural safety trainings, including an Indigenous-White implicit association test and unannounced standardized Indigenous patients 

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Email Sam.Filipenko@unityhealth.to to receive the link, meeting ID & passcode.