Translating knowledge on poverty to humanize care: benefits and synergies of community engagement with the arts

Abstract

The knowledge translation movement in health has led to the production of vast amounts of knowledge tools aimed at broadening clinicians’ evidence base and improving the quality and efficacy of their practices. However important, these tools, largely oriented towards biomedical and technological aspects of care, are of limited potential for addressing the complex interactions between patients’ socio-economic contexts and their health. Yet health professionals frequently lack the sensitivity, knowledge and ability to incorporate approaches to poverty within their practices; this is partly due to their limited understanding of the lived experience of poverty and of the complexity of barriers underprivileged people face to achieve and maintain health. In a context of persisting social inequalities in oral health, the Montreal-based Listening to Others multi-stakeholder partnership has been engaged in developing health professional education on poverty since 2006. In this article, we describe and reflect on how service users representing the Québec antipoverty coalition, academics from University of Montreal and McGill University, representatives of Québec dental regulatory bodies and artists collaborated to produce an educational film on poverty. Project partners’ specific contributions to the film script are highlighted, emphasizing their potential to enrich the health professional educator’s practice knowledge base. In doing so, this article provides an explicit and concrete example of how participatory processes can support co-learning and knowledge co-production through engagement with the arts. The overall aim is to demonstrate how participatory research can enhance knowledge translation by producing educational tools that promote critical reflection and address complexity.

Keywords:

• participatory action research
• knowledge translation
• health professional education
• underprivileged

Acknowledgements

This project has benefitted from ongoing support and encouragement from the following organizations: the Québec Order of Dentists, the Québec Anti poverty Coalition (le Collectif pour un Québec sans pauvreté), the Québec Order of Dental Hygienists, University of Montreal Faculty of Dentistry and the McGill University Faculty of Dentistry, Division of Oral Health and Society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the Quebec Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Exportation (MDEIE). The first author has equally received financial support for doctoral training from the Québec Health Research Fund (FRSQ); the Montreal Center for Research on Social Inequalities and Discrimination (CREMIS); and the Network for Oral and Bone Health Research (NOBHR).