Rural Global Health Partnership Initiative

The Rural Global Health Partnership Initiative (RGHPI) offers grants to support projects spearheaded by rural BC physicians or medical trainees and their partners based in underserved rural communities in British Columbia, other parts of Canada, or internationally.

Photo caption: Katherine Gray on a cervical screening project in Rwanda with Dr. Vidler (left) & Dr. Iginareza (right)

Achievements

Funded six new projects

A total of six new grants were awarded in the 2022/23 fiscal year. All projects were founded on the principle of strong, ethical partnerships that contribute to supporting the local capacity of health services in underserved rural communities. The projects also needed to promote and enhance rural generalism, and result in sustainable benefits to partner communities. Projects included rural hospital infrastructure development in northern Ghana, bidirectional rural health education learning between BC and Brazil, a project to young women in Lax Kw’alaams, BC, with skills to respond to a first aid emergency, a project to set up a virtual educational platform for family physicians undergoing additional surgical training, a study into healthcare provider perceptions of cervical cancer screening in Rwanda, and a Bhutan-Canada mental health resilience project.

Completed a project in Nepal

The Nepal Adult Palliative Care ECHO: A Two Worlds Cancer Collaboration project was completed. The purpose of the project was to improve palliative care services and build capacity in rural and remote Nepal through the provision of an online education program for Nepali healthcare providers (e.g. physicians, nurses, pharmacists). The education program ran between January 2022 and May 2022 for a total of 16 weeks.

Explore the Numbers

6 Projects Awarded Grants

Projects create an opportunity for reciprocal learning in diverse contexts. RGHPI aims to demonstrate how a health partnership can create innovative solutions to address healthcare challenges in rural BC, Canada, and globally.

16 Weeks of virtual ECHO training

The project used the virtual ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) model to train Nepalese practitioners, particularly in rural and remote areas of Nepal, in adult palliative care. 

Making a Difference

With funding from the RGHPI grant, the team that provided CPR training for youth living in Lax Kw’alaams were able to expand beyond that community, offering workshops in Kitselas near Terrace as well, training a total of 43 participants.

Morgan Towriss said: “I think this project will make a real difference for the communities that we worked with. Not only are the youth now prepared to respond to a medical emergency, but they have gained skills that will enable them to take leadership roles in their community. We hope that providing this opportunity to engage Indigenous youth in healthcare will increase the number of youth pursuing healthcare-related careers, ultimately allowing them to increase the capacity for medical care in communities and hopefully helping to address the issues with lack of representation of Indigenous voices in medicine in Canada.”

Plans for the Future

In the next year, the team hope to engage more applicants with projects that highlight knowledge and innovations with respect to the impacts of climate health on vulnerable populations, mitigations and adaptations to the harms of disrupted ecosystems due to climate, human activities, and natural disasters.