Two Psychiatric Nursing students want to change the way the LGBTQ2S+ community receives acute and community care in hospitals and other health care settings. 

During their recent practicums, Balraj Maird and Nisha Khattra saw firsthand how LGBTQ2S+ individuals experienced prejudice in health care facilities, which often prevented them from seeking treatment in time of need.  

Balraj recalls meeting a LGBTQ2S+ patient at St. Paul’s Hospital, in Vancouver, who didn’t seek care for her mental health issues for fear of being discriminated against. The patient knew she needed help, but distrust and fear prevented her from reaching out. She eventually found herself forcibly admitted to hospital after a suicide attempt. 

“If we can work on making the hospital a better place for her to come to when she’s feeling down and sad, and not getting to the point of attempting suicide, that would be the ultimate goal,” Balraj says. 

Nisha points out that using a LGBTQ2S+ patient’s personal pronouns demonstrates respect and validation for their identity. During her practicum at St. Paul’s, she deliberately wrote down the patient’s pronouns in all handover materials during shift changes at the hospital.  

Despite her effort, Nisha observed that some staff, especially casual nursing staff, did not address the patient using correct pronouns, making this vulnerable LGBTQ2S+ individual feel disrespected. 

Read more: How this Douglas alum built a blossoming career as an activist for the LGBTQ+ community 

Making hospitals more inclusive  

“We want to prepare ourselves to provide LGBTQ2S+ individuals with the most culturally competent and safe care possible,” Nisha says. 

After this experience, Balraj and Nisha embarked on a journey to alleviate the stress and stigma often felt by the members of the LGBTQ2S+ community when they seek medical care. 

The two studied 21 peer-reviewed articles to look for practices that would be most effective in increasing LGBTQ2S+ cultural competency in a health care setting.  

Cultural competency is the intricate integration of knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours that improves cross-cultural communication and interpersonal relationships. 

They found that health care providers report feeling underprepared to work with LGBTQ2S+ patients due to a lack of knowledge of their unique health needs. Cultural competency could be achieved to enhance interactions between LGBTQ2S+ patients and health professionals, according to their study. 

Balraj and Nisha highlighted the value of workshops and self-reflection in bridging these knowledge gaps. “Workshops are pretty effective in increasing health care providers’ knowledge of working with this population, getting to know their needs and understanding how stigmatized and discriminated against they are,” Balraj says.  

“We also found that health care professionals who practise self-reflection throughout their careers were able to identify these knowledge gaps,” Nisha adds. 

When working with LGBTQ2S+ clients, they advise that health care providers use inclusive and gender-neutral language, and exercise sensitivity when asking questions about sexual orientation.  

Two years into their practicums, the duo is thrilled to find that hospitals are gradually implementing the recommendations in their study. “We’re seeing a lot of workshops on LGBTQ2S+ care knowledge. Health care providers are becoming more knowledgeable about pronouns, and patients’ chosen names as well,” Balraj notes. 

Read more: This Douglas student is championing trans-inclusive sports and recreation 

Student research opportunities 

For their efforts, Balraj and Nisha won the People’s Choice Award at Douglas College’s Student Research Days last year and presented their research at the WNRCASN 2023 Symposium. 

Nisha says she is thankful that a wide variety of research opportunities are offered at Douglas College. 

 “If there’s something that students are really passionate about, they have the opportunity to actually go pursue it and gain more knowledge,” Nisha says. 

By Aline Bouwman, Marketing and Communications

As she was waiting to board a flight to Rwanda last summer, Hazel Fairbairn was asked – more than once – if she was a missionary heading to Africa to do religious aid work. 

In fact, the Douglas College Music Technology instructor was on her way to the Rwanda School of Creative Arts and Music to join five Douglas music students on a special project that would see the group taking lessons from Rwandans on music, education and the power of community. 

Now, Hazel is using what she learned in Rwanda to transform music education at home and help her students find their own rhythm through a unique teaching model.  

Read more: This Douglas College Music Diploma alumn turned her music passion into a profession. 

Flipping the narrative 

Located in the capital city, Kigali, the Rwanda School of Creative Arts and Music (RSCAM) emphasizes rehearsal and performance under a unique evaluation model Hazel calls “play and feedback.” Through this model, students play their music in front of a jury and receive immediate verbal commentary. Students then incorporate that feedback and come back to rehearsals for further rounds of critique as they hone their skills and performance. 

For Hazel, this educational framework levels a profound challenge at the individuality and hierarchy inherent to music education in Canada, and the Western world at large.  

“The style of teaching in Rwanda made me realize how important it is to give honest and candid feedback to students,” she says. “Seeing how music is taught in Rwanda has shown me that community-oriented values can coexist with educational rigour and musical excellence.”  

Hazel points out that Western education models still carry the legacy of colonialism, and music education is no exception. She explains that modern music education has not diverted much from classical pedagogy, which builds on a laddered learning structure based on individual progression, hierarchical instruction and theoretical examination. 

That way of learning is so saturated in Western education that it can be difficult to imagine what it could look like under a different structure. The paradigm shift required to undertake such a reimagining, Hazel believes, is precisely what Rwanda has to offer to musicians, teachers and students of music. 

“There’s no real reason why instrumental skills couldn’t be taught in a more oral tradition, which focuses on listening and repetition as the main means of learning,” Hazel says. “Auditory-based teaching methods like the play-and-feedback model emphasize community learning rather than the individual quest for perfection.” 

Read more: Hands-on learning prepares Music Technology students at Douglas College for a successful career in the industry. 

The power of community 

While strides are being made to decolonize the classroom in Canada, Hazel points out that stubborn colonial narratives persist. It is still a widely held belief that Westerners travel to African nations to bring education, enlightenment or development. 

But back home in Canada, the opposite is true. Hazel believes it is Western educators who can learn from diverse cultural contexts and be transformed by African education.  

As for the music students who took part in the project in Rwanda, the trip not only allowed them to experience a different educational culture, but it also resounded with their own learning styles. 

Jussarah Bellow, a second-year Music Technology student, highlights how the communal focus at RSCAM helped her come out of her shell, musically speaking. 

“It was a welcoming and joyful environment to be in,” Jussarah says. “In the past, I was shy with others in showing my musical abilities, but during the trip the musicians we met helped me grow in my musical journey. They were so encouraging, and I became much more comfortable on stage.” 

Hazel agrees that music students learn best through doing. “Instruction should be about facilitating rather than instructing,” she adds. “Travelling to Rwanda has renewed my conviction that music is not about individual excellence – it is about the power to create community and reach more people.” 

In fact, individual performance was not a common sight at RSCAM at all.  

“I never heard anybody playing on their own,” Hazel says. “I’m not sure I ever saw anybody in Rwanda doing anything on their own. Everything is about community. Everything is about connection and how people are building something together. And music is such a beautiful place to do that.” 

Learn more about Douglas College’s Music and study abroad programs on our website.