Team Up! Webinar: Indigenous Perspectives in Team-Based Care
Team Up! Team-Based Primary & Community Care in Action is a webinar and podcast series that aims to connect individuals and teams, identify tools to apply to current work underway and share experiences in team-based care across the province.
On June 13th we explored how to integrate Indigenous Cultural Safety into team-based care services. The principles of Indigenous Cultural Safety and addressing Indigenous-specific racism may be new to many, and some teams may feel unprepared to implement these essential practices. In this interactive session, we delved into practical ways to apply these concepts within your own team-based care settings.
Mark Matthew grew up on the reserve of the Simpcw First Nation near Barriere, B.C. and has observed the consequences of colonization in his family, friends, and community. He continues to reflect on his unearned privilege of a white presenting male due to mixed parentage.
Mark’s career in health began in 2007 as the Aboriginal Contracts Advisor at Interior Health. Just over a year later he joined the FNHA as a Community Development Liaison and eventually took on the role of Acting Director of Community Engagement in 2011 supporting communication, collaboration, and planning and health with First Nations throughout BC. After nearly a decade working in engagement, he moved to a new Quality team at FNHA in 2019 as the Manager of Quality Initiatives and Partner Relations. Here he was able to support efforts like the revision of the BC Health Quality Matrix, BCs Standard on Cultural Safety and Humility and participate on an Indigenous Advisory Committee for Patient Centred Measurement and the Cultural Safety and Humility Compla-ints Collaborative. This work has given him the opportunity to explore various opportunities for change across the health system.
Mark continues to be motivated to pursue a career where he can be part of positive change in First Nations and Indigenous communities. He has been an effective facilitator, relationship builder and successful at finding the commonalities between the different realities faced by First Nations and non-Indigenous health leaders/providers.
Currently Mark lives on Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops) with his wife and two kids. He likes to keep active and enjoys a good friendly competition for time to time.
Jessica Guss is of mixed ancestry that includes the Haida, Xaxli’p, Xwisten and Squamish Nations as well as mixed European descent. Her traditional name is t’łisala (Kwak\’wala, for ‘brings light to others’).
Jessica has 20+ years of experience in Business Administration Management, including 8+ years working in Indigenous health and wellness. Jessica has the ability to evaluate the performance of cultural safety initiatives including the development and documentation of data in alignment with provincial measures and indicators. Experience with reviewing, recommending and development of new policies by ensuring that cultural safety is a core attribute of quality healthcare through standardization of key practices. Jessica’s work experience and skills includes project management, leadership, engagement, meeting facilitation, cultural humility teaching, film and video coordination and content development, survey design and dissemination, data collection and document control, public speaking, quality improvement and much more.
Adam Finch was raised on Vancouver Island on the unceded traditional territories of the Quw’utsun Nation. With a mixed ethnic background of settler-colonial European and African American heritage, the tension between unearned privilege as a (mostly) white-presenting male, and the experience of racialization, motivates his personal reflections and professional passion to understand systems of social reproduction – and strategies to interrupt them.
Adam began his career in Indigenous Health in 2016 with the First Nations Health Council before moving to the First Nations Health Authority in 2017. Adam had the privilege of working alongside BC First Nations communities in the development of FNHA’s urban and away from home framework before transitioning to the work of embedding cultural safety and humility (CSH) and eliminating Indigenous-specific racism from the health system. As a senior advisor in CSH with FNHA, Adam developed educational materials, guidance on anti-racism policy and process, and supported system-wide initiatives to improve health services for BC First Nations such as the In Plain Sight Task Team and the HSO Cultural Safety and Humility Standard.
Adam believes that a meaningful and fulfilling life is found through service, and finds it an honour to be able to utilize his passion and gifts to contribute to a more culturally and psychologically safe health system for all. He is always up for a casual or in depth conversation about social theory and systems change. When Adam doesn’t have his face in a book or glued to screen, he can usually be found building and playing modular synthesizers or cycling on the weekend to a gulf island to recharge in nature. Adam currently lives on the unceded and shared traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh Nations with his spouse and two unruly cats.