Building a BRIDGE to Community Wellness

The Opportunity

British Columbia is home to rich cultural diversity, with nearly one in three people born outside of Canada. Yet too many people from immigrant and racialized communities often experience persistent health inequities, and difficulty accessing healthcare. Language and cultural differences, systemic inequities, and a lack of meaningful community representation in health research and planning can make it more difficult for people to receive timely and appropriate care.

When communities are not included in shaping healthcare systems, important health concerns can go unrecognized, and opportunities to improve health outcomes can be missed. Building trust and lasting relationships with communities is essential to creating effective, equitable healthcare programs that serve everyone in British Columbia. Currently, the perspectives of different immigrant communities are not consistently integrated into population health research or practice. For many reasons, including a lack of resources, the health systems data used to identify inequities lacks the community input necessary to plan for useful public health programs that will improve these inequities in our province.

For public health programs to work, researchers need to have the relevant information necessary to ensure health and wellness for all communities in BC. This requires community involvement and connection, particularly in racialized communities where there exists a lack of trust due to the systemic racism that exists within healthcare.

Today, there is an opportunity to transform how healthcare research, planning, and delivery are informed by the people most affected. By ensuring that community voices are heard and respected, we can create a healthier future for thousands of individuals and families across our province.

The Solution

With the support of generous donors, the Foundation is helping the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) and the University of British Columbia-Center for Disease Control (UBC-CDC) establish BRIDGE (Building Relationships to Integrate Community-Driven Guidance for Health Equity) with im/migrant and racialized communities across BC. The BRIDGE Centre for Immigrant and Racialized Health is being developed by BCCDC researchers to ensure “immigrant and racialized communities are co-leads in shaping the health systems that serve them.” By collaborating together, communities, researchers, public health systems leaders, clinicians, and the like, hope to ensure that research practices and new policies are grounded in community knowledge, lived experiences, and cultural contexts. The goal is for public health research to have community leadership as the foundation, building trust and creating the opportunity for a long-term collaborative partnership. This way, future policy is shaped by research that includes community perspectives, making programs more effective for the communities they serve.

An important first step of the project involves establishing shared governance, documenting community health priorities, mapping the communities each partner organization reaches, and producing the first ethnicity-specific health profiles for some of British Columbia’s largest immigrant communities. This will create the foundation for future work that will use the needs of communities to shape research agendas, health system planning, and public health programming; for one maintained network to serve multiple initiatives rather than each rebuilding its own; and for earlier detection and treatment of conditions where timing is essential for improving health outcomes.

The Impact

The BRIDGE Centre has the potential to transform health outcomes for thousands of people across British Columbia by connecting communities to care in ways that are culturally safe, accessible, and trusted.

Canada has joined the UN’s commitment to eliminate viral hepatitis as a public health threat by 2030. The work done by the BRIDGE team is helping to achieve this goal by meeting those who need access to hepatitis care where they are at, and communicating to them through the community organizations — and in the languages — they trust and understand.

BCCDC research shows that South Asian and East Asian people are diagnosed with hepatitis C roughly a decade later than others, and carry a disproportionate burden of kidney disease, diabetes, and cardiac events, particularly when untreated. Chronic hepatitis B follows a similar pattern and is more prevalent in East Asian communities. It is largely without symptoms in its early stages, so many people are diagnosed only once late-stage disease has developed, and a manageable condition becomes life-threatening. By creating specific health profiles for East Asian and South Asian communities, BRIDGE will be able to identify where disease burden is higher and where detection is delayed. And once those patterns are identified, community-based organizations already hold the trusted relationships needed to reach people, rather than relying solely on a connection with a primary care physician. The foundation of the BRIDGE project is designed to be transferable, and can help inform similar programs around the province, or across the country.

At the heart of this initiative is community leadership: Community organizations serve as co-leads, with partner staff holding community co-investigator roles and decisions about engagement design led by community partners. Engagement is structured across three levels within each organization, involving leadership through governance consultations, frontline staff through focus groups, and community members through community circles facilitated by partner staff in participants’ preferred languages. A Community Council of members with lived immigration experience will provide feedback on the Centre’s priorities and engagement processes, as well as reviewing research findings and advising on interpretation and knowledge mobilization, with honorarium provided for their time. Their knowledge, relationships, and lived experience help ensure that solutions are practical, meaningful, and responsive to the needs of the people they serve.