Researchers Respond to a Community in Crisis

Like so many communities across Canada, Windsor-Essex faces a crisis in mental health care. With limited resources available, the families of people in mental health crises often bear the weight of caring for loved ones in the face of a system that seems fraught with barriers. In October 2021, a University of Windsor team, funded by the WE-SPARK Health Institute, presented a conference aimed at these families called Caring for the Caregiver. The concept for the conference started with Clementa Stan in the Odette School of Business, who is also a member of the Mental Health & Addictions Patient & Family Advisory Council at Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare (HDGH). She brought her idea to Dr. Edward Cruz in the Faculty of Nursing and Dr. Jennifer Voth at HDGH, and together they embarked upon a process of understanding what caregivers needed, so that they could assemble a conference that responded to those needs. Stan described the experience of working with researchers as meaningful. “They listened to me as the knowledge user and were excited to embark on the knowledge translation piece of the research. Without them and the institutional support we received from our institutional collaborators, the conference would not be possible.” Like many events, the conference pivoted from in person to virtual because of COVID-19, but this meant that the audience could go from local to global. “We had participants from as far away as New Zealand, and the conference was profiled by Global News Edmonton as well as local and social media, so it certainly has national reach,” notes Dr. Cruz, who described the experience of the conference as “one of the most rewarding of my career.”