IPR.Global Scholar Spotlight - Dr. Stella Ng, University of Toronto Centre for Interprofessional Education (Canada)

Hello to the IPE/IPC community. My name is Stella Ng PhD, Reg.CASLPO and since May of 2021, I have been the director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Interprofessional Education. I spent nearly a decade prior to this as the director of research at the same university's Centre for Faculty Development. So, I am no stranger to health professions education; yet I am somewhat new to the IPE/IPC community. That said, while I am treating this spotlight submission as an introductory piece for myself, I must say it has felt more like returning home since I changed roles. 

I started out in my career as an educational audiologist, liaising between health care institutions and the public education system. I worked closely with children and their families, teachers and principals, school psychologists, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and clinical professionals (e.g. developmental pediatricians). It was from this practice experience that my passion for education science was eventually born. I went back to school and completed a PhD in Health Professional Education after the wonderful health professions education scholar Anne Kinsella handed me the book “The Reflective Practitioner” by Donald Schön. This book resonated with the indeterminate zones of practice I had found myself working within. While my formal education had exposed me to “evidence-based practice” as one way to approach practice, this model was falling short in the unique, value-conflicted, uncertain, and dynamic context of school-based health. So, for the past 15 years I have been studying reflective practice as a way of navigating the uncertainty of everyday practice. I have studied critical reflection as a way of reflecting that calls attention and propels change to unhelpful/harmful assumptions, power relations and social structures. And I have been studying and advancing transformative education and critical pedagogical approaches that help health professionals be critically reflective practitioners. I sum up my research, education, and leadership praxis as “critical reflection & pedagogy for collaborative, compassionate, ethical health care / science.” 

I am so thrilled to come home to the IPE/IPC community after a decade spent in faculty development and a bit more in the medical education world. While IPE and medical education are both a part of the broad health professions education field, there is a certain familiarity in the collaborative healthcare and education context. I believe collaborative approaches are more important than ever as we work together to create a world where trust and a deep sense of belonging are the standard, for all who seek or work in healthcare. I am looking forward to learning and working together with this community, toward a vision of a healthier world. 

Email Dr. Ng at: stella.ng@utoronto.ca

IPR.Global Scholar Spotlight - Dr. John H. V. Gilbert, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC Canada)

Hello, I am John Gilbert. Throughout my long career I have been passionately interested in the education of health and social care professionals, not only in British Columbia, and Canada, but also globally. I have attempted through my research, teaching, writing and public speaking to embed the concept of interprofessional education as a central tenet of collaborative people-centred practice and care. Like Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford, “gladly wolde I lerne and gladly teche.”

I was the founding Director of the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at the University of British Columbia and the Principal of the College of Health Disciplines, also at UBC. It is my privilege and pleasure to be a Senior Scholar at the WHO Collaborating Centre on Health Workforce Planning and Research, Dalhousie University, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. I have been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and at the National University of Malaysia. From 2016 2020 it was my great honour to hold the DR. TMA Pai Endowment Chair in Interprofessional Education & Practice, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India a program with which I count myself most fortunate to remain connected. 

As Co-Chair of the WHO Study Group on Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice I worked with colleagues around the world to develop a framework for action on those topics – now adopted worldwide, in innumerable education and practice jurisdictions. Our work on IPE, supported by Health Canada, led to my role as founding chair of the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative – now one of the members of the confederation – Interprofessional.Global, and its special interest group Interprofessional Research.Global. I have the joy of being accorded many honours of which I am proud - a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada, the degree Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa from Dalhousie University. Together with Dr. Bud Baldwin and Dr Mattie Schmitt I was immensely honoured to be a recipient of the Pioneer Award from the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education.

My greatest joy, and a source of lasting pleasure, has been the invitations I have received to give talks (and Webinars) on IPE in 24 countries during the past 16 years. My academic background gives me a particular focus on communication between and amongst everyone engaged along the continuum of IPE. I never cease to be incredibly impressed by the ways in which our new discipline is being woven into education and practice in so many different cultures and languages. I have always been so warmly greeted in each country I have visited  on the “business of IPE” and have made amazing friends and colleagues in all those places. Every day I recognize how blessed I am to be in the company of those who, around the world, are working in many new and innovative ways to embed the discipline of IPE in their health and social care education and practice programmes. 

During each season of the year, you may find me pottering in my vegetable garden – amazed, always, that seeds often less than a few millimetres in size, can produce such wonderful food.

Interprofessional Research.Global Scholar Spotlight is a regular feature that highlights member research in Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice.  

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