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.