ABOUT RHE-SETS
What We Hope to Accomplish
The Rural Health Equity Research cluster is comprised of a multi-disciplinary group of researchers with the goal of building collaborations with rural community partners to understand the current health technology landscape and social enterprise opportunities for addressing existing and future health/healthcare gaps.
Rural health inequity is a multi-faceted, complex problem and not amenable to simple or short-term solutions. Innovative and culturally safe, community-responsive approaches are needed that recognize the unique, diverse, and changing rural context.
The Rural Health Research cluster brings together multi-disciplinary researchers to build collaborations with rural communities and leverage their strengths to:
- Conduct high quality, collaborative, community-based rural health research
- Build capacity for rural and Indigenous community research and innovation among trainees, communities and researchers through workshops, and relationship building and reciprocal learning activities
- Support the translation of research evidence to benefit rural communities.
Community Engagement
Using workshops, surveys and user experiences to identify areas of concern
Utilize Technology
Determine rural community challenges and increase technology use.
Finding Partners
Attracting and encouraging local investments and partnerships
Improve Health Equity
Innovate solutions to issues like food security and distance to health care.
Addressing the Issues
Well known health and health care disparities exist in rural communities in British Columbia. Dispersed rural and remote community settings accentuate the drivers of ill health and limit access to health care. Rural living children/youth, older adults with chronicity, and Indigenous People are most affected by health and health care disparities, given systemic forces, such as socio-economics, history, power, systems and structures (e.g., colonization, institutionalized racism), language, and worldviews that disproportionately disadvantage these groups.
Community-Driven Solutions
The goal of the Rural Health Equity through Technology and Social Enterprise (RHE-SETS) research cluster is to explore community-driven solutions.
We currently have community partners in Grand forks, Kaslo, Lillooet, Nelson, Oliver, Princeton, and Williams Lake.
Want to PARTNER with US?
The RHE-SETS team will explore how solutions can best integrate rural values, culture, and strengths.