Funding: Bringing stigma reduction training online
Dr. Javeed Sukhera, assistant professor in Psychiatry and Paediatrics at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry is taking his training out of the classroom and into the digital domain.
Dr. Sukhera focuses his research on mental illness stigma reduction, implicit bias in health professional education and facilitating authentic youth and community engagement with the health sector.
Through his research and curriculum development, Dr. Sukhera has been delivering implicit bias and stigma reduction training in London with promising results. Now, he and his team are working on a project to translate the current stigma reduction curriculum onto digital and online platforms.
Thanks to a recent grant from AMS Healthcare, the project aims to design, implement and evaluate digital stigma reduction curricula which can be scaled and spread across diverse contexts.
By leveraging the existing implicit stigma reduction curriculum that Dr. Sukhera has developed, he is now working to understand how digital technology and social media may enhance the scale and reach of the training.
“We will use the funds to honour the lived experience of youth with mental illness and their caregivers as we co-create curriculum that enhances compassionate patient care,” said Dr. Sukhera. “The grant also provides an opportunity to explore how digital technology can be leveraged for other organizations seeking to improve compassionate care for all types of patients.”
The funding is provided through the 2018 Invitational AMS Phoenix Project Call to Caring Grant. AMS is a Canadian charitable organization with an impressive history as a catalyst for change in Canadian Healthcare. For 80 years, AMS has had a profound impact through its support of history of medicine, the education of health care professionals and by making strategic investments to address critical issues in our health care system. Today, AMS is focusing their efforts on the impact of AI and technology on the delivery of humanistic, compassionate care.
