Thank You For Speaking Up

Thank you for speaking up.

To the paramedic who called out their colleague for their racism/bias that affected patient care in October of last year.

To the paramedic & family members who spoke up earlier in the pandemic alerting the world about the conditions in personal care homes. (The investigative report is being released today, February 4th/21)

To the city of Winnipeg employees who pushed until anti-racism training was announced last week as mandatory for all city employees.

To the community members organizing groups, campaigns and education initiatives to improve system literacy of everyday citizens to participate in political and system decision making.

To the leaders in our health system and community organizations fighting to provide basic needs and also advocate for systems change.

Thank you for those who speak up in places where we as patients couldn’t find our voices. In moments when citizens are incapacitated, in too much pain or not being believed, thank you to the helpers, relatives and staff people who raise their voices. It is so frustrating that stories like this continue to happen where specifically Indigenous people are not provided with equitable health care in places where adequate healthcare is dispensed just fine to many other patients around them. It’s possible, we do it everyday.

Thank you to everyone who speaks up in places where the things we shared as patients were invalidated. When someone signal boosts your concerns and your ideas, validating your voice and utilizing their privilege so you can access services - that is the medicine our systems need. We have many great helpers within the systems who already do this, but they need back up and we need the quiet ones to speak up. I say this often, but I mean it: we need everyone.

Thank you to the countless volunteers who are putting in hour after hour helping put together solutions and articulate ideas that our systems can easily integrate. The benefit of doing it this way is the ideas/solutions often already have public buy in and are backed up by research and science. I want to give special love to the strong women who have been leading the way at Health Buddies Winnipeg as we meet each week to devise a way to support patients in accessing quality health care.

Manitoba Patient Rights

We have identified Patient rights as a great way for patients to be able to articulate what they expect when they are in a heqa;lth care environment. We want to develop pocket cards with these rights. Thank you to the Manitoba Institute for Patient Safety for putting together the 10 Health care rights (see below). We have learned that 2 of these rights are enshrined in Manitoba legislation, but we have a goal of having ALL 10 MB PATIENT RIGHTS legislated. This way patients can articulate what they need and refer to something that is a system wide agreement, one that providers and patients alike have agreed to. Maybe I am dreaming, but this is only the beginning. If you have other suggestions or idea I know we would love to hear them at Health Buddies.

all 10

I hope that by encouraging those who have taken the risk of speaking up for systems change at the expense of making their work environments personally uncomfortable, we can create work environments where we all speak out. Racism in systems hurts all of us and we need to collectively work to eradicate it. I want allies who wish to help address systemic racism to know that the discomfort you will experience is a small price to pay to prevent people from dying at the hands of systems that are supposed to keep people safe.

To those who speak up despite the discomfort, thank you.