Dr Mandy Archibald joins the Centre

Dr Archibald is an artist and nurse-clinician scientist from Canada who has joined Prof Alison Kitson and the Knowledge Translation team as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

"As a child, I spent countless hours drawing and creating, living the truth that all children are artists. As a teenager, I admired those people who marched forward with a seemingly clairvoyant vision of their future. As an adult, I recognized that I needn’t abandon my passion for the arts in exchange for my dedication to health research, and that contrary to the popular tendency to dichotomize, divide, and polarize, that art and science can (and dare I say should) work together. As a result, I have come to know that there are few things more rewarding in life than realizing your vision.

My vision involves bridging the arts and sciences to co-create and communicate research that is engaging and meaningful to diverse stakeholder groups, such as healthcare professionals and the public. This means merging my experiences as an exhibiting visual artist and nurse academic to approach health research and knowledge translation in new ways. In my PhD (University of Alberta, 2015) this involved using storytelling and visual art to communicate complex research evidence to parents in a manner that reflected their needs, priorities, and experiences. This merger, along with additional training as a clinician-scientist with mixed methods and arts-based research training, helped inform the patient-driven and creative approach to knowledge translation research that I am helping to pioneer.

In my role as co-lead for the knowledge translation component of the CRE, I will build on these approaches, emphasizing co-design and early stakeholder involvement to ensure projects reflect the frail individuals perspective and are linked together in mutually informative ways. As such, a guiding question for my work with the CRE is “How can we think creatively about health and research to improve wellbeing and support healthy ageing?” In part, the answer resides in creating meaningful partnerships, and the trans-disciplinary nature of the CRE exemplifies this sentiment. As such, an important aspect of my role is creating linkages between the numerous projects within the CRE, and helping diverse researchers, healthcare practitioners, and the pubic work together to maximize the meaning and impact of the results.

I believe that impact hinges on public engagement with research and that creative approaches are needed to incite awareness and provoke questioning of the many taken for granted assumptions held about health, illness, and everything in between. As such, I am passionate about bringing health research out of the spaces where it is traditionally shared, such as universities and hospitals, and into the public realm. Accomplishing these aims requires unique collaborations with community artists, frail and well individuals and their families, as well as health care professionals, to ensure that each view is considered in our research.

A path is anything that connects where we have been to where we are going. Coming from an original passion and practice in the arts and health, I look forward to embarking on this meaningful journey of discovery and translation in frailty research."