The Beginning: Reflections on My First Masters Course

When I first started this journey I was not quite sure what I’d gotten myself into. “What is an eportfolio?” “How do I tweet?” are a couple of examples of my questions to Google in those first couple weeks. As the course progressed and I became more comfortable with the technology and search engines of the internet I began to see the value of using these tools. Taking this course has made me more aware of the health related information available and how to find it. It has also made me think about health and all it’s intricacies through many different lenses. We started with defining health, and although this sounds straight forward I quickly realized that there are many different ways to define it and interpret the definition. Looking at the determinants of health raised many questions about how to begin to improve one’s health, and how to support others in their quest for optimal health through the multiple levels of the system.

In these final few weeks I have really begun to see the value of putting all of these learnings together. When looking at vulnerable populations and how they are most affected by the determinants of health and how they are at an inherent disadvantage in the system has made be realized just how broken our health care system is. Being from Manitoba and having a high population of Indigenous people who we serve in our healthcare system I find the disparities towards this populations even more glaring. So how do we begin to fix this broken system? I see through this course and reading the thoughts of my peers that there are many brilliant minds in this country, and many ideas on how to right some of the wrongs in the system. We can only hope that as we move forward in our careers that we can be the ones to affect the change. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “you must be the change you want to see in world.”