This article describes the First Nations Community Education Program, an initiative that fosters the development of cultural humility and capacities in cultural safety in medical students. Using an innovative combination of experiential learning and humanities-informed pedagogy, the program serves the broader goal of having medical schools assume their responsibility in addressing the well-documented disparities in health status that persist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada.

Educating Medical Students' 'Hearts and Minds': A Humanities-Informed Cultural Immersion Program in Indigenous Experiential Community Learning also details the impacts of the program and provides a resource for other medical education programs considering similar initiatives focused on cultural humility or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.

The First Nations Community Education Program was developed and implemented as a collaborative project of the Northern Medical Program (itself the result of a partnership between the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine and the University of Northern British Columbia), the First Nations Health Authority, and Northern Health.

Citation

de Leeuw, S., Larstone, R., Fell, B., Cross, N., Greenwood, M., Auerbach, K., & Sutherland, J. (2021). Educating Medical Students’ “Hearts and Minds”: A Humanities-Informed Cultural Immersion Program in Indigenous Experiential Community Learning. International Journal of Indigenous Health, 16, Issue 1, 87-107. DOI: 10.32799/ijih.v16i1.33078.