Author: Kayla Isomura

Since June 2020, Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) has offered health care to residents of Renfrew-Collingwood through RISE Community Health Centre. Using a team-based approach that recognizes the social determinants of health, RISE operates a primary care clinic and not-for-profit pharmacy. Additional services include harm reduction, community development and health promotion.

We share some highlights from staff about their experiences working with RISE and what makes it different from traditional healthcare providers.

Meet Munira, RISE registered nurse

Nearly three years ago, Munira Rupani started working at RISE Community Health Centre as a medical office assistant. In April 2024, she transitioned into a role as a registered nurse.

What brought you to RISE? 

“I was new to Canada. I came here in 2021. I was looking for jobs and then I found this opportunity. It’s actually so far from my home but I really like it so I started working here in 2022. The environment, people and my passion for helping others brought me here, and I’m still attached to RISE for that.”

Tell us more about what you like about working here. 

“The primary healthcare. When I was back home, I didn’t have any experience working in primary healthcare, so I learned how primary healthcare works at RISE and how we can help people so they don’t end up going to the hospital. We treat people here with the maximum we can do and refer patients to different clinics for different purposes. We do pregnancy tests here, STI management here, many kinds of bloodwork, many kinds of urine tests, and many, many more things. It’s holistic care for patients.”

What makes RISE different or unique from other healthcare settings you’ve worked in? 

“RISE is unique in that the environment is really friendly. It’s focused towards patient care and the well-being of the staff so I never feel overwhelmed. I always have a support system here. If I’m stuck on something, I know someone will help me. I love to take challenges because I know that if I get stuck, people will help me out. Yeah, so the support system and patient-centred care, which inspires me to work here, and makes it unique.”

Can you talk more about patient-centred care? What benefits do you see in that?

“So many people who have come here, in my three years of experience, are new immigrants or refugees to Canada. They have to set up a housing support system and health care, which is hard to navigate nowadays. RISE is like a holistic care for them, so from their housing to their food, schooling, healthcare and everything else, they can get information or support through RISE.

“If we can’t treat a client, we can assist them and refer them to another program, so they have peace of mind.”

Who should apply to work at RISE? 

“Everyone is so passionate and has a non-biased approach. So, like open-minded people. We care for people who are drug users and we treat patients with STIs, for example, so the person applying should not be biased.

Anything else people should know about working here? 

“RISE is a very nice place to work and the people are so nice. I said it before that everyone is so supportive. This was my first job in Canada but I have never felt like I’m the odd one out. I always felt like a family here.

“I know that if I ask for any kind of help or support, they will support me. And I passed my nursing exam while working here, so my manager, my director, everyone was so supportive, and they encouraged me to take the exam. They helped me a lot in getting my license here. Yeah, so they were so supportive. It always feels like family.”

Learn more about career opportunities at RISE Community Health Centre at cnh.bc.ca/careers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Since June 2020, Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) has offered health care to residents of Renfrew-Collingwood through RISE Community Health Centre. Using a team-based approach that recognizes the social determinants of health, RISE operates a primary care clinic and not-for-profit pharmacy. Additional services include harm reduction, community development and health promotion.

We share some highlights from staff about their experiences working with RISE and what makes it different from traditional healthcare providers.

Meet Philippa, RISE family nurse practitioner

For over two years, Philippa Lentz has worked with RISE Community Health Centre as a family nurse practitioner. Graduating shortly before starting at RISE, they were immediately drawn to the unique health care model and work environment that RISE offers.

“RISE is actually my first job as a nurse practitioner,” explained Philippa. “I already knew a bunch of people who worked here just from being in community with cool healthcare providers in Vancouver.”

“I had a really good idea of the way that the team approaches care, and so I didn’t apply anywhere else, I actually just came straight here.”

Tell us about your experience over the last 2+ years.

“I stayed. I haven’t worked anywhere else as a nurse practitioner, so I don’t have the comparative experience but it has been fantastic. It is a really wonderful place to work as a new grad. So, you know, for anyone who’s a nurse practitioner, they hired me as a provisional before I even got my OSCE, and were really supportive in mentoring me. The whole team just kind of took me under their wing. So if anyone’s looking for a first job as a nurse practitioner, it’s a great place to be.”

What else makes it a great place to be?

“The number one thing I would say is, I’m sure other people have said this, but being part of a team is really wonderful, and, as a provider, it makes so many things easier.

“Currently, I’m about to leave on parental leave, and I’m just working with my replacement right now. It’s really great showing another person what we can do as a team. For example, I’m helping somebody right now with weaning off of their anti-anxiety medication and they’re having a bit of a hard time. I was able to immediately talk to the counselling team about them and get them an emergency check-in within two days for free, and then I was able to use the nursing team to schedule a bunch of check-ins.

“There’s not anywhere else that I can think of that you have such a well-integrated team, where you have so many services at your fingertips. And I trust all of my co-workers. They’re pretty careful when they’re hiring, having like-minded people, and I don’t know how to say that better, but there’s no one on the team that I don’t trust with my patients.”

So, who would be a good fit to work at RISE? 

“I think anyone, I mean, truly. There’s a lot of diversity in the types of people who work here and the types of professions that work here. But I think that anyone who is looking for a place where they can slow down a little bit and provide excellent wraparound care. And for anyone who is discouraged with how hard it is to do that in a lot of places, I would say, give it a try. I have felt so well-supported in my ability to provide the type of care that I want to. If you’re interested in working with a bunch of different populations, elderly folks, lots of queer clients, people with no MSP, those types of things, then come join our team.”

Can you elaborate on the benefits of wraparound services and having support from other staff?

“It’s so helpful. When you have such a great group of people with different scopes of practice, everyone can work at the top of their scope.”

Anything else people should know? 

“I would honestly say give it a try. I don’t know what else to say. It’s really lovely here. It’s a really friendly environment.

“If you are feeling like you don’t know if you can provide certain care, like, for example, if you haven’t started to develop certain parts of your practice, the team is really, really great at supporting you and also giving you the time that you need to educate up. They’re happy to help with sponsoring you to do things like your opioid agonist treatment prescription program or whatever else you need to do to get what you need for your practice.

“It’s also right on the SkyTrain line, so it’s really easy to get to work.”

Learn more about career opportunities at RISE Community Health Centre at cnh.bc.ca/careers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Since June 2020, Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) has offered health care to residents of Renfrew-Collingwood through RISE Community Health Centre. Using a team-based approach that recognizes the social determinants of health, RISE operates a primary care clinic and not-for-profit pharmacy. Additional services include harm reduction, community development and health promotion.

We share some highlights from staff about their experiences working with RISE and what makes it different from traditional healthcare providers.

Meet James, RISE registered nurse

For over three years, James Kendal-Ward has worked as a registered nurse at RISE. Recently, they have also been working as an interim patient care supervisor.

What originally brought you to RISE? 

“I originally applied because I knew someone who worked here. The patient care supervisor who worked here in 2021, we worked together as nurses at another site. She sent me a text and invited me to apply. I also had another friend who was working here as a nurse, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re hiring. Yes, I’m on my way!’”

What has made you stay over the last 3+ years? 

“I really like it here on a practical, day-to-day level. If you’re nursing, you tend to go towards shift work, which are like day shifts, night shifts and a cycling schedule. Even in other sites I’ve worked at, it’s been rotating shifts, so you never have the same schedule. On the practical level, working the same hours, the same days every week, has been life-changing for me as a nurse. I know I’m free on Tuesday afternoons, so it’s practical for me not to have to figure out my schedule.

“Also, the team here is amazing. I really like doing primary care. It’s not something that they focus on in nursing school. They focus on acute care. Primary care is quite complex and nuanced, like really relational care. I have had the same patients for as long as I’ve worked here. You get to know people. You get to know their baseline. Then, it’s a matter of making sure that their baseline improves over time, which is fantastic, and stabilizing people, keeping them out of the hospital by being in relation with them through a healthcare lens.”

Has there been anything that has surprised you about working here? 

“The pace surprised me. Before working here, I worked in the hospital and I worked at one of the urgent and primary care centres. The paces for those were different, but here, there’s very rarely a five-alarm fire.

“If someone needs to go to the hospital, we try to get them to the hospital and a lot of times, it’s folks with barriers we are trying to convince to go to the hospital. But if anyone is acutely ill, they go to the hospital. So, it’s not like hospital shift nursing, where you have to be like, am I thinking about this person’s oxygen? It’s more thinking about how they are going to spend the next couple of weeks. So there’s a lack of that urgency, which means you get to think, problem solve and do more case management, which is still mentally quite invigorating.

“It also surprised me that this was one of the jobs where you can get a coffee and talk to your co-worker for 10 minutes about a different patient, and you’re not going to be buried with work because there’s space for that. But I go home at the end of the day and I’m still tired because there’s so much thinking, navigating, planning and coordinating.”

And with healthcare and team-based care. Clients are not here to do one thing. 

“I think it also surprised me how collaborative it is working here. I know I am very spoiled in this job. Working here, we have the team and there are registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, social workers, counsellors, medical practitioners and general practitioners. Everyone has their own training and so the variety of voices, viewpoints and opinions is valuable. We do team-based meetings, and we really listen and support each other. I am not enacting orders from anyone, we’re all participatory in this clinic.”

Who do you feel should apply to work at RISE? 

“I feel like the people who know themselves to be relational, like nurses and and primary care supervisors, the folks who did well in the social determinants of health courses in nursing school, the folks who are at the hospital being like, ‘Wait, if we discharge this person, aren’t they going to come back immediately?’ and the ones who can see the gaps in the system.

“I feel that RISE, in being its own model, there’s a little bit more satisfaction in filling some of those gaps and being able to feel like a positive change in our healthcare system.”

What type of clientele should applicants be familiar with or comfortable working with at RISE?

“Folks with barriers to care, specifically newcomers, people who need help accessing, status, MSP or other legal protection. Folks who are low income and also in this community, because we have our community catchment, so like people who are familiar with Renfew-Collingwood, people who like working with older folks, people who like seeing babies. People who like, taking a two-year-old’s measurements and trying to navigate getting them on the scale. It’s quite broad.”

Anything else people should know about working here? 

“It is possible to work in a place where you feel like everyone is so earnestly, honestly and compassionately trying to do good for people. Without exception, everyone here is trying as hard as they can to help and that’s incredible. If you want to do that, come. If you’re feeling healthcare burnout in other places, come to us. It’s a heavy load but we’re so nice and we have snacks. If your goal is to have a sustainable work-life balance and to be able to make dinner after work, and have things like waking up on your first day off and make breakfast and not feel exhausted, it’s a lovely place to work. We don’t have shift premiums but we have a great work-life balance.”

Learn more about career opportunities at RISE Community Health Centre at cnh.bc.ca/careers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Since June 2020, Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) has offered health care to residents of Renfrew-Collingwood through RISE Community Health Centre. Using a team-based approach that recognizes the social determinants of health, RISE operates a primary care clinic and not-for-profit pharmacy. Additional services include harm reduction, community development and health promotion.

We share some highlights from staff about their experiences working with RISE and what makes it different from traditional healthcare providers.

Meet Vanessa, RISE nurse practitioner

Before Vanessa McMahon started her role as a nurse practitioner at RISE, she spent 18 years working as a registered nurse. When she returned to school to study in her new field, working at RISE was part of her student placement three years ago. For Vanessa, it was “such a positive and supportive experience” that she decided to stay.

Tell us about your experience at RISE.

“In my previous work at BC Children’s Hospital, I was part of team-based care. When I came here, it was very similar. It felt like home for me in the sense that I love working in a group setting with multi-disciplinary input, especially when you’re dealing with complex cases and individuals, to not feel like you’re by yourself and you can lean on the expertise of your colleagues. I also find the camaraderie, the open-mindedness of the staff and the accepting nature of the work environment here to be wonderful.”

Has anything surprised you about working here? 

“I don’t know if there are necessarily surprises. I think it’s been interesting. We’ve had a few other students come through since I graduated. What I say to all of those students is that they are going to have a wide breadth of experience here, which is so fascinating. Every day is very different. You get exposed to the full scope of primary care practice, so it’s a wonderful place to get that generalized experience.”

And that’s what makes RISE unique for a healthcare setting. 

“Yeah.”

RISE is currently hiring. Who do you think should apply to work here?

“I think somebody who comes from a social justice lens, somebody who takes the social determinants of health seriously, somebody who likes to work in that team-based environment and someone who is curious, willing to learn.”

What are some highlights of working with clients at RISE, especially with such a big range of clients? 

“Because we do outreach visits to supportive housing units, trying to reduce those barriers to accessing care. And, over the last few years, through relationship building, I feel like I’ve had great satisfaction when there have been clients who haven’t engaged in their own health for decades, who are now feeling safe enough to do so. There are those occasions where you realize, they’re coming for their appointments. We’ve developed that trust and that relationship with somebody who may have had terrible experiences in the past.”

Is there anything else you would want other healthcare professionals to know about working at RISE? 

“It’s a very supported environment. Because we can deal with more challenging and complex social and health issues, it truly is a very supportive environment. You’re not going to be on your own, you’re not going to be figuring out these complexities in isolation. I’d say that the big take-home message is just teamwork.”

Learn more about career opportunities at RISE Community Health Centre at cnh.bc.ca/careers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Since June 2020, Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) has offered health care to residents of Renfrew-Collingwood through RISE Community Health Centre. Using a team-based approach that recognizes the social determinants of health, RISE operates a primary care clinic and not-for-profit pharmacy. Additional services include harm reduction, community development and health promotion.

We share some highlights from staff about their experiences working with RISE and what makes it different from traditional healthcare providers.

Meet Tharuna, RISE family physician

Over the last four years, Tharuna Abbu has worked as a family physician at RISE. Learning about RISE through friends familiar with the community health centre, Tharuna said they were drawn to the team-based approach and general model.

“I understood [RISE] to be quite embedded in community and responsive to really local needs,” said Tharuna. “I really liked that as a contrast to a more top-down approach.”

Four years later, they have continued working as a physician at RISE.

In your four years of working at RISE, what has your experience been like?

“I think it says a lot that I am still here in this role and still very happy in this role. I would say that this is probably the best team of human beings who work here [and] the best team that I have ever worked with. Not only do we work well professionally as a team but we all genuinely like each other, seem to get along and can have fun together, which I think goes a long way in making a sustainable workplace.

“It’s also amazing to be in a workplace where there are so many other BIPOC people and other queer people. That’s pretty special. I haven’t come across that in a lot of other work placements.”

What are some highlights of working with the clients that you serve?

“I love the community here. I used to live in the neighbourhood, so it’s really familiar for me but it’s really lovely to go for a walk on my lunch break and see our clients out and about living their lives. [I] get to connect with them in a more organic way and glimpse [into] other bits of their life that I maybe otherwise would not get to do in a regular clinic setting.

“I feel like the neighbourhood itself [is] so engaged. The people who live here and who come to the clinic are keen to be involved with the neighbourhood house and also with the clinic. They’ve really helped us co-create programming and services that they want to see and that’s been really, really cool. There are some special, unique things that RISE has been able to create, specific to the needs of the people who live here.”

What has surprised you about working here? 

“It’s not surprising but I feel like you see hard-working, lovely people struggling so hard in every system and they’re also getting hit from all sides. They’re struggling with housing, immigration, childcare [and] affording basic healthcare services like vision care or dental services.

“That’s not everybody in this community but this community embodies all of the ways that our systems aren’t serving people and are letting so many people, especially the working poor, fall through the cracks completely. So that is surprising to see the breadth of how many people and how many families are affected. “

And that goes back to the community healthcare model.

“Totally. And I think something special about working at RISE is even though we’re not necessarily able to change the broader system, we’re able to do some small part that maybe helps one person or one family succeed through those barriers and get to that next place. That’s been great. We collectively all celebrate every deportation that was stopped, we collectively celebrate every person who found new housing that we were so worried [about]. We’re all rooting for everybody’s success and that’s just nice to work in an environment like that.

“I don’t want to make it sound like we’re in a clinic that will magically solve everybody’s problems. We don’t have the capacity for that but I think within the capacity that we do have, we’re a team that wants to try to make that difference, and push and try and advocate for people. I wish that we could clone this clinic.”

RISE is currently hiring. Who do you think should apply to work here?

“I think this is an excellent workplace for community-minded people, especially folks who have an orientation to what justice means in a broad and fairly political way. I would say that many of our staff are actively reflective in terms of the political landscape and all of the barriers that people face.

“The staff here are pretty similar in terms of our core values and our approach to things. I think we’re a clinic that welcomes people who want to jump in, who have ideas and who have relationships with this community, especially [those who] can run with ideas in this clinic. There’s a lot of staff who meet our clientele and they get an idea. They’re like, ‘I want to make this program happen’ and then we often are able to find a way to do that.”

Is there anything else you would want other healthcare professionals to know about working at RISE? 

“As a physician, it’s an interesting model. I am salaried, which is uncommon for doctors. At the same time, I have not batted an eye at that. There are lots of benefits to having a known, steady stream of income and not having to worry about how many patients I see in a day or if patients are a no-show. I feel like it alleviates a lot of that pressure.

“So, that’s something specific to physicians that I think people should keep in mind and chat with clinic managers about but otherwise, it’s a pretty excellent place to work. I’ve totally enjoyed my time here at RISE. I’m going on parental leave but I fully intend on coming back.”

Learn more about career opportunities at RISE Community Health Centre at cnh.bc.ca/careers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.