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.

Links and Notes

• Abe’s website is abeoudshoorn.com (on Twitter at @abeoudshoorn)
• Listen to conversation with Gerda Zonruiter on the cost of poverty

 

…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.

Notes

• javeedsukhera.com – Javeed’s website
• Be #traumainformed – a presentation by Javeed for primary caregivers and service providers (filmed at the Caring for Syrian Newcomers forum on January 27, 2016)
• @javeedsukhera – follow Javeed on Twitter
• Cultural Humility – blog post by James

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.