New Adventures in Our Arts for Equity Research!

We are excited to introduce our new blog to share about our latest research with our Arts-based Spiritual Care (ABSC) Project!

Responding to the TRC Calls to Action: 

It has been long known and widely recognized that traditional healing practices are central to encouraging and supporting wellbeing in Indigenous communities. Yet, unfortunately, current healthcare practices often lack spaces that feel culturally safe, or that encourage the holistic wellbeing of their patients.  

Our research team is comprised of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members, who are collaborating together to listen and respond to the TRC Calls to Action:

“We call upon those who can effect change within the Canadian health care system to recognize the value of Aboriginal healing practices and use them in the treatment of Aboriginal patients in collaboration with Aboriginal healers and Elders...”

-The TRC Call to Action # 22

Given the wide range of spiritual beliefs in our global culture, repeated calls to decolonize healthcare, and amplified spiritual distress, we recognize that healthcare needs new approaches to provide spiritual care. 

What is Arts-based Spiritual Care?

Spirituality is important to health and wellbeing, and yet, the urgency associated with medical treatment often shifts the attention away from spiritual engagement. In healthcare settings, patients often find it difficult to make their spiritual preferences known, or feel that their spiritual needs go unmet while dealing with physical illness. 

We believe art can provide alternative, meaningful ways to connect our internal worlds and something greater than ourselves. Art also has long been associated with the sacred, especially in Indigenous communities.  

It is for this reason that we came together as an Arts-based Spiritual Care research team!

We seek to foster research around using art in spiritual care to help develop holistic health care in a way that leads to integration of the mind, body, spirit and emotions. 

Our purpose is to advance equity-oriented arts-based spiritual care as a culturally relevant healing application.

Our research question seeks to understand how, why, for whom, and in what circumstances arts-based spiritual care could help people facing complex illnesses. 

The outcomes of our research will enable spiritual care practitioners to design and implement more inclusive art-based spiritual health initiatives to serve Canadians in all their diversity.

Our Project Initiatives:

As an Arts-based Spiritual Care Team, we have begun several initial projects that will lay the groundwork and foundation for many years of exploratory research.

• We have begun to develop an amazing and diverse team of spiritual care practitioners, health and social science scientists, Indigenous mentors, artists, patients, and students, led by Dr. Kendra L. Rieger, Dr. Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham and Dr. Anne Tuppurainen. We are also grateful for our Indigenous Advisory Circle, led by Switametelót Patti Victor and Elder Mabel Horton. (We look forward to sharing more about our full team in a future post!)

• We have fostered strong connections at several research site locations across Canada, and are collaborating together to learn, create, and develop knew knowledge through our arts-based spiritual care research.

• We have completed a scoping review of current articles that connect to the field of arts-based spiritual care in healthcare, and have published our findings.

• As part of our qualitative research, we have begun to hold focus groups and conduct conversational interviews with spiritual care practitioners across Canada in various healthcare settings, to gather stories, experiences, impacts and challenges with using arts-based spiritual care.

We are extremely grateful to have recently received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in B.C.. We will continue to apply for more grants to keep fueling our exploratory investigation around what art and spirituality can offer towards equity-oriented, holistic health care.

Our Communication Plans:

As part of our Arts-based Spiritual Care Knowledge Translation plan, we aim to share about developing research and resources on a regular basis. 

We will be doing this through monthly blog posts on our website, as well as sharing on our ‘Arts for Equity’ Instagram, and Facebook social media accounts. 

We encourage you to follow along and share our posts with others who you think may be interested in this research!

Stay tuned! Over the next few months we will be sharing more about various members of our team, research sites, our funding, scoping review, resources and preliminary findings.

-The Arts-based Spiritual Care Team