A community conversation: As tax payers and charity givers, we spend millions of dollars to address poverty… but does it all really make make much of a difference? And how do we measure the impact?
Abe Oudshoorn is currently Assistant Professor and the Year 3 & 4 Lead at The Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing, Western University. He is cross appointed with Lawson Health Research Institute and the Department of Psychiatry, Western University. His teaching interests involve community health, mental health, global health, research methods/statistics, and advanced Nursing theory. And his research interests include women’s homelessness, program evaluation, health promotion, critical ethnography, qualitative methods, participatory action research, poverty and health, critical theory, mental health, and others.
…the most common health problems, and the hardest to treat, lie at the blurry line between body and mind, where emotional scars from troubled pasts may surface as physical illness, pain and depression. (Hospital heals scars of war, inside and out)
We cannot see each other’s past experiences, but we are constantly learning more about the ways that past experiences influence our minds and bodies. In working with individuals arriving in London from Syria, psychiatrist Javeed Sukhera has recently had countless conversations with people who have endured refugee camps, witnessed violence and murder, lost their families, experienced torture, or faced sexual assault. He argues that to effectively help one another, we need to be acutely aware of how trauma and violence affects human psychology and physiology.
Javeed joins us to talk about why having a ‘trauma-informed’ perspective is essential not only for professional healthcare and social service workers, but also for the rest of us in society, too.
Javeed Sukhera is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Paediatrics at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University. He is also the Senior Designate Physician Lead for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at London Health Sciences Centre.
This is just one final reminder that the Organizing Equality conference is happening this weekend at Museum London.
Please note: There will be a presentation about the Centre for Research on Health Equity and Social Inclusion presented by Helene Berman and Heather Lokko on Saturday (March 25) at 8:30am in the Lecture Theatre. Do come and join us.
See the full conference schedule for other terrific keynotes and learning opportunities over the course of the weekend. These sessions are free for all to attend. (Access to meals and refreshments over the weekend require a $15/day or $50/weekend registration.)
Imagine if we actually knew how much poverty cost us in economic terms. What if we could take everything into account — from the cost of shelters, to the strain on the health care system, to the lost economic productivity due to people not working — and then calculated a number? Gerda Zonruiter suggests that developing a common metric for measuring the economic impact of poverty helps communities make better and more strategic decisions.
Gerda Zonruiter is a researcher and evaluation consultant assisting human and social services organizations make evidence-based decisions. Prior to working independently, she spent 15 years working as a social policy researcher for the City of London.
