Our Way to Wellness

Since 2023, AbSPORU has partnered with the Metis Settlements Health Board (MSHB) and the Indigenous Wellness Core (Primary Care Alberta) to support a community-led effort to improve healthcare services across the eight Metis Settlements in Alberta.

Metis Settlements in Alberta have historically faced significant health inequities, including limited access to healthcare services, high emergency department utilization, and gaps in primary care as identified in a 2018 Community Health Assessment. Beyond access, Settlement leaders identified a deeper challenge: conventional Western research has often failed to reflect Metis Settlement priorities, experiences, and ways of knowing, with research historically externally driven and deficit-focused.

Addressing their experience required a fundamentally different approach — one that prioritized Metis self-determination, reciprocal relationships, and community-defined understandings of health and wellness.

The Role of AbSPORU

The role of AbSPORU in this process has been to support communities in achieving their own priorities — not to direct the work. We provided support that upheld sustained relationship building, embedded implementation science, and facilitation expertise while recognizing that Metis governance structures and ways of knowing would lead the decision-making.

This approach has shifted traditional power dynamics in research and explored how implementation science and learning health system approaches can advance Indigenous self-determination.

The Impact of AbSPORU

AbSPORU remained engaged throughout the project from the pre-award phase onwards. Over half a million dollars in grant funding was secured via co-development of the CIHR funding application, with AbSPORU’s Learning Health System Team establishing the foundation for the initiative and facilitating engagement with Settlement leaders and health system partners.

The role of AbSPORU was then expanded to provide embedded implementation science and research support, facilitate community meetings and surveys, and conduct qualitative interviews. As well, we co-developed accessible and community-centered knowledge mobilization products which were enthusiastically received and prompted further requests for accessible communication.

Major milestones for the project included the completion of interviews across all eight Metis Settlements and the establishment of the Research Leadership Committee, a Metis Settlements-led governance body responsible for providing ethical guidance and ensuring that all project activities remain aligned with community priorities. The transparency, accountability and ongoing dialogue strengthened relationships, built trust, and created the implementation infrastructure essential to the project’s success.

Broader Impacts and Sustainability

What began as a relationship-building initiative has evolved into the co-creation of sustainable research governance structures, strengthened partnerships among communities, researchers, and health system organizations, and established a foundation for long-term, community-led health system transformation.

The initiative is positioned to co-develop a Metis Settlements Implementation Framework that integrates implementation science with Metis Settlement ways of knowing. That framework would have the potential to support future healthcare planning, and, contribute to a greater understanding among healthcare providers, researchers, policymakers, and health system leaders about culturally safe, equitable and community-led approaches to healthcare delivery and system improvement.

By centering Metis leadership, governance, and ways of knowing, the initiative demonstrates how patient-oriented research can move beyond consultation toward shared leadership and self-determination.