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New Initiatives Set to Enhance Medical Support for Black Communities
Project starts vital conversations to bridge a massive divide between Canada’s health-care system and the African, Caribbean and Black communities. February 3, 2025 The Interplay of Trust and Care: Navigating Healthcare in the ACB Community The interplay of trust and care significantly influences healthcare experiences, particularly for marginalized communities. This dynamic is exemplified in the case of six-year-old Moses, who was hospitalized at Toronto’s SickKids for a vaso-occlusive crisis due to sickle cell disease, a condition he learned about shortly after birth. His mother, D. Ramsay, faced numerous challenges while seeking…
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‘A deeply rooted distrust’: Black patients have far less access to living kidney donors and researchers say racism is partly to blame
Project starts vital conversations to bridge a massive divide between Canada’s health-care system and the African, Caribbean and Black communities. September 19, 2024 Cheril Wilson Smith’s daughter was in excruciating pain from sickle cell disease when she brought her into an area emergency department needing urgent treatment. “I just figured when you go into the ER, doctors would know about that,” Wilson Smith said. “But I’ll never forget how I felt when the doctor asked me if I was sure that she had sickle cell. A doctor in the ER was very reluctant…
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‘A bridge between two worlds’: An OISE alumna’s path to enhancing access and understanding in healthcare and education
“I receive knowledge and I pass it on – but first, I have to make sense of it and I do it through an intersectional lens of race, disability, gender and class,” says Getfield. Photo by Marianne Lau. September 24, 2024 At 14, Jacqui Getfield (DPhil 2022) envisioned a future as a broadcaster, journalist or university professor. She quickly realized the first two dreams, but the third took time and a deeper sense of purpose, which ultimately came from motherhood. “My journey to find an academic home started in 2000. I knew I…
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Profile: Jacqueline Getfield, project manager of CARM
CCRM, the publisher of Signals, has enhanced its long-standing relationship with the University of Toronto’s Medicine by Design through a new strategic alliance. This portrait is one in a series of portraits that feature “people of Medicine by Design.” Some minor edits may have been made to the original published version. Oct 18, 2024 “I’m the project manager of Caribbean African Regenerative Medicine (CARM). CARM is funded by Medicine by Design. Our focus is to inform and educate African Caribbean Black communities about regenerative medicine and to inform medical professionals about the…
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Rebooting the system: Why culturally inclusive care matters
As a parent and as a professional advocate, Jacqui Getfield has seen firsthand how Black communitiesstruggle to access adequate healthcare. She’s working to bridge those gaps. Feb. 27, 2025 Updated July 25, 2025 at 2:12 p.m. 5 min read Contrary to the sentiments driving much recent pushback against DEI, inequality is not an abstract concept for those who experience it firsthand. By Sarah Liss Special to the Star Last year, the journal Public Health published the results of a survey of more than 2,000 Black Canadians aged 14 and older. Nearly…
