Flip it Around! To being a good reminder on how you’re supposed to live: understanding the role of storytelling as a means of encouraging compassionate listening in Type 2 Diabetes healthcare settings

Abstract

This thesis explores how the act of storytelling in healthcare care can facilitate compassionate listening and act as a means of improving the relationships between Indigenous patients who have type 2 diabetes and their caregivers and supporters. By centring relationships and Indigenous life stories, this research brings together two individuals as co-creators of found poems that reflect a life journey with type 2 diabetes. Through the sharing of Indigenous stories, this thesis implicates the researcher as a settler allied-listener who is gifted with one’s life history with type 2 diabetes. This research is grounded in the importance of relationships, allyship, and deep listening while engaging in Indigenous stories. Together, the co-creators of this research create an online poetry reading to be used as a tool for healthcare educators, students, and caregivers. This thesis addresses two main research objectives. The first objective of this research is to explore how the act of Indigenous storytelling and subsequent listening to health narratives is relevant to the delivery of holistic and culturally respectful diabetes health care to Indigenous Peoples. Secondly, this research also aims to present a life-story health narrative in the form of an online poetry reading to informal and formal caregivers of Indigenous patients in Sudbury in order to communicate the importance of the relationship between Indigenous storied health experiences and Indigenous spiritual and psychological wellbeing. Given that diabetes is intergenerational in many Indigenous families and something that an individual may live with for several years of their life, a life story is well-suited to this kind of health narrative research. This will aim to help establish a more culturally-safe healthcare system and decolonize the interaction between patient and healthcare providers in Indigenous communities while also engaging in relationship based research informed by allyship.