CHES is proud to host a monthly session of the Cutting Edge Speaker Series on the second Tuesday of each month from 12:00-1:30pm, with virtual connections available to all distributed sites. Presenters will be drawn from our internal UBC community, as well as external institutions. Depending on the month, the Cutting Edge Speaker Series will vary in a rotation of three different speaking genres:
- The What I’m Thinking About sessions are designed to promote questions and discussion around an emerging topic relevant to health professions education. Each session is facilitated by a moderator, and will usually include two to three short presentations of theoretical, research-based, or implementation findings before moving into group questions and discussion.
- The Invited Speaker Rounds are focused to present a critical examination of current topics of interest in health professions education research. Each session will feature an invited local or international speaker, who will present their program of scholarship, with audience questions and discussion to follow.
- The Joanna Bates Lectureship will feature a presentation from a CHES trainee, fellow, student, or alumni in recognition of the legacy of CHES’ founding director, Dr. Joanna Bates.
Learning Objectives – by the end of each session, participants will be able to:
- Identify and challenge current thinking in a particular area of health education scholarship.
- Relate concepts explored to their local educational context for the purpose of improving education practices and informing educational innovations.
- Relate concepts or insights explored to their own scholarship.
If you have a suggestion for a topic or presenter, please contact rola.ajjawi@ubc.ca.
November 2025 Invited Speaker Rounds
Art & Voice: Co-designing healthcare education research with people with lived experience
Gabrielle Brand RN, BN, MN (Research) PhD, SFHEA
Professor and Director of Graduate Research
School of Nursing & Midwifery, Faculty of Medicine,
Nursing & Health Sciences,
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2025
Time: 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Hybrid: IRC Room 414 & Zoom*
Zoom Details: For connection details, please email ches.communications@ubc.ca.
Abstract
Whose knowledge is of value in health professions research, education and practice? Healthcare education has predominantly focused on the perspectives of academics, clinicians, and students, rather than the voices of healthcare consumers. In this presentation, Professor Gabrielle Brand will share her innovative co-design methodology expertise that foregrounds lived experience voices into curricula to teach health professions students to move beyond the “clinical diagnosis” to more person-centred approaches to healthcare. In this presentation, Gabrielle will be joined by her research fellow James Bonnamy and PhD student Cameron Marshman to share examples of their creative arts-based healthcare education research projects in Australia including narrative portraiture, MRI art, verbatim theatre and the use of life size body mapping to explore contemporary issues in healthcare, education and practice.
Biography
Professor Gabrielle Brand is the Director of Graduate Research at Monash Nursing & Midwifery and is a passionate nurse, educator and qualitative researcher. She has over 20 years’ experience in healthcare education. Her research interests include narrative medicine, health humanities and creative and critical pedagogy. She is recognised as an education leader in the co-design of education with healthcare consumers and is the co-founder of the ‘Depth of Field’ © an arts-based teaching methodology used across Australia and New Zealand to teach current and future health professionals to move beyond “diagnosis’ to a more humanistic models of care. More recently her research has included planetary health education, integrating tolerance of uncertainty pedagogy into higher education and co-designing simulation-based education with healthcare consumers to address cognitive bias in healthcare. Gabrielle has published and presented her research in Australia and internationally, authored over 100 research outputs, including several book chapters.
The Division of Continuing Professional Development, University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine (UBC CPD) is fully accredited by the Continuing Medical Education Accreditation Committee (CACME) to provide CPD credits for physicians. This activity meets the certification criteria of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and has been certified by UBC CPD for up to 15.0 Mainpro+® Certified Activity credits. Each physician should claim only those credits accrued through participation in the activity. CFPC Session ID: 301903-001 to 301903-010. RCPSC ACCREDITATION: The CHES Cutting Edge Speaker Series is a self-approved group learning activity (Section 1) as defined by the Maintenance of Certification Program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.