Suzanne Glavin has been a long time supporter of ImmUnity Canada, and is the winner of the 2024 Jacques Dagnault Award for Excellence in Volunteering.
In recent weeks, she has reached out to health professionals and worked to ensure that an infusion clinic now hands out information about Immunity Canada to patients. She has also been invited to introduce Immunity Canada to health professionals attending monthly immunologist/allergy meetings, as well as ensuring that a treating physician and One Path are providing information about ImmUnity Canada to patients. We asked Suzanne a few questions about her experiences and her answers are below.
Why did you want to get involved in outreach to clinics?
I saw the benefits of what patients got out of being connected to the doctors and information, and how important that is – there was a real need for it. If you don’t have the knowledge of what happened to you and what might happen to you, your journey forward is very difficult. As a teacher I also think it’s important for education and this is a way to give that information from doctors to patients and make sure doctors, clinics and patients are all connected together as a network.
Why do you think it is important to get involved with this initative?
Initially, being diagnosed, everything was a mystery and it was hard to get Canada-specific information relevant to us. ImmUnity Canada offers a lot of assistance for patients that people aren’t aware of, whether its financial, whether its information, whether it’s providing events to learn from, and its important for people to see that that is there for them.
How would you encourage others to get involved?
It’s like a snowball, you start out small and it starts to roll, and the more opportunities people had, the more numbers we had and they saw the benefits of what we’re doing and were more eager to get involved. In particular, newly diagnosed people may like to get involved, and see the benefits of this for their own families.
What advice would you give to people who are interested in doing this kind of volunteer work and just starting out?
What I found was that talking to my own immunologist was the easiest way to get my foot in the door, and from there, they have their own connections and they will be able to connect me to others in their own practice or throughout the hospital.
You’ve connected with specialist clinics already but what kind of approach would you recommend for Family Practice and Urgent Care clinics?
Perhaps connecting to universities and going through their family practices because in their courses they all have to do a specialty on immunology, and it’s important to make that initial connection before young students go out into their practice.
The Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba – to connect to that group and see if there is a way to connect to general practitioners to disseminate information through their standard methods.
Some immunologists are in regular practices outside of the hospital, so they too have some collegial connections within their buildings, with the aim of connecting to some of the physicians in the buildings, across the board.