Compassion as a superpower

As health care organizations across the world grapple with challenges, how can we emerge better, stronger and kinder than before?

 Marika Sandrelli has worked in community education and development projects for more than four decades. In this episode of The Heart of It, she shares why being a mission-driven person is more powerful than any policy or legislation. She also discusses what pulled her into the health system, why compassionate trauma and resiliency-informed practice (TRIP) is needed in health care now more than ever, and the impacts of “brave” spaces in achieving lasting, systemic change.

Guest bio
Marika Sandrelli is a strategic leader with Mental Health and Substance Use Services at Fraser Health. 

As a community organizer and activist she saw the health care system as confusing and advocated from the outside. One day someone said, “You have to learn the rules before you break them.” So, she joined the system and in 2015 won Fraser Health’s Health Care Hero Award for changing how learning and practice are approached in mental health and substance use.

Marika co-developed a Trauma and Resiliency Informed Practice course for researchers and evaluators, which she continues to facilitate along with her colleagues. Her caring approach has resulted in more skilled, confident, supported and supportive health care providers who are both better equipped to serve vulnerable patient populations with confidence and compassion, and take pride in the work that they do.

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About The Heart of It
Every episode, Dr. Victoria Lee, president and CEO of Fraser Health, invites guests take listeners to the heart of health care, where passion, dedication and innovation drive individual, community and planetary health.

Listen and watch more episodes of The Heart of It here. And be sure to subscribe to The Heart of It in your favourite podcast player app so that you don’t miss a beat.

The Heart of It is recorded on the traditional, ancestral and unceded shared territories of the Katzie, Kwantlen, Coquitlam, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen First Nations, and the home of the Surrey-Delta Métis Association.