Promoting Resilience Within Public Health Approaches for Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Resilience within public health is conceptualized to be fostered through individual, community, and systemic initiatives that promote capacity through interconnected primary, secondary, and tertiary health interventions. Within community public health settings, particularly for Canadian Indigenous communities, an emphasis on interconnected, multisystemic interventions that promote resilience can be particularly useful. Fostering resilience within Indigenous health seeks to prioritize unique needs of individuals and communities, through both process- and outcome-based measurement. Given that Indigenous individuals’ needs may differ from non-Indigenous populations in Canada, careful consideration of how to best conceptualize, measure, and promote resilience is required. Tools such as the Native Wellness Assessment and the First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework can be helpful to both measure and conceptualize resilience, as they can provide insight on what is considered to be best practices to increasing wellness within Indigenous communities. Such tools continue to prioritize the multisystemic promotion of resilience.

‘Not a panacea’ – Expert perspectives on the concept of resilience and its potential for palliative care

“…The literature reinforces this by arguing in various places that resilience ‘should be viewed as an interactive process, rather than an outcome’. 33 This highlights the added value that the concept of resilience offers for palliative care (research question C): Such an understanding of a procedural nature simultaneously excludes rigid concepts and implies that support of patients and significant others in a nonlinear disease trajectory should be based on equally nonlinear concepts. In a study examining survivors’ perceptions of hope, the majority of respondents defined hope as resilience, which in turn was defined as ‘strength or a (coping) strategy to endure adversity’.…”