nursingforsocialjustice

I am currently attending the Internatinal Society for the Study of Drug Policy Conference. The conference location is the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver. I have some feelings brewing. I am going to express them now. I invite you to come along this journey of self-reflection and judgement with me.

How do you move from research to policy, and then side-move from policy to practice? What spaces do these types of exchanges happen in? I am fairly certain it is not going to happen in a homogenous space filled with like-minded scholars and academics…especially when the room is mostly filled with white men? This becomes more disappointing the more I think about it. Ugh…am I part of the solution, or part of the problem? Can I be both?

Is there worth to actually targeting conferences to a diverse population so it’s not just a bunch of people agreeing about stuff and making each other feel smarter? I sure am judgey.

I realize that the focus of this conference is drug policy, internationally. I understand the importance of policy-making and the change it can effect on how Health care services are designed and delivered, even the way health care services are evaluated and changed. Today however, I feel like this room is filled with many sociologists and political scientists and lawyers and researchers that are disconnected from my work, my world (in many ways), as a clinician.

I feel lonely here, as a clinician. I also feel uneasy that there are not more clinicians here. Have you ever sat at the direct care level, as a clinical and thought, who made these policies because they don’t actually work in my daily practice?

I get it now, the value of and interdisciplinary research team and the tremendous need for not only clinically driven research but clinician led research.

Participatory Action Research? Engaging the subjects of research in the research? In deciding the research questions?

P.S. I made up the term praxis engineering and haven’t defined it…so don’t steal it and use it for something else not related to nursing.