Natasha Thambirajah has now ended her term as part of the 2022 SPPGA Practitioner Fellowship program at UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA). The Fellowship aims to bring mid-career policy practitioners to SPPGA to share their applied expertise and experiences with our community of faculty and students as well as to delve into a research project based on their area of interest, and bring new insights back to their professional work.
Natasha came to SPPGA from her role as Director, Digital Health Policy at the Province of BC, having led deep transformative, citizen-centred public policy over the past 15 years. She will returning to her role at the Ministry of Health.
SPPGA Director Allison Macfarlane said: “We are grateful for Natasha’s contributions to student learning, particularly around careers in the public sector, her collaboration with colleagues on public health, and her convening of high profile public events. We look forward to keeping in touch and engaging with her in the future!”
SPPGA connected with Natasha to hear her final reflections.
SPPGA: What were the highlights of your time spent with SPPGA?
The beautiful environment on campus. UBC is the most beautiful university in Canada.
I liked working with MPPGA students: they’re a bright, super articulate, and promising group of professionals.
There are also such interesting minds among the faculty. It was nice to reconnect and learn from fellow academics. There were so many opportunities to learn while I was at UBC, so overall it was an amazing experience. I had a great time connecting with SPPGA faculty such as profs. M. V. Ramana, Veena Sriram, George Hoberg, as well as faculty with the School of Population and Public Health.
And SPPGA staff were super supportive, including Tamara Baldwin and my gifted supervisor, Allison Macfarlane. I also really appreciate the incredible support Lindsay Marsh, the communications team and other staff provided to help me pull all those talks together, so thank you.
SPPGA: What was your engagement like with our MPPGA students?
I talked to MPPGA students about policy careers, and coached a couple of students. Such rock stars you have there.
I hired two students, Sabah (MPPGA) and Kennedy Ryan (Political Science), who collaborated with me to create a stunning, publication worthy evidence base in barely three months for my research project. Sabah and Kennedy kindly spared a bit of time recently to present the research findings with my team at the Ministry of Health. We’re now prepping it for publication; they will also be getting credit for that work.
SPPGA: We greatly appreciated you organizing and participating in two, high profile public events at SPPGA. What were your main takeaways from these panel discussions?
A number of people from the public sector attended which was great to see. I got some positive feedback from people who reached out to me afterwards and some re-posted the events on social media to encourage others to see the videos.
Virtual events are a double edged sword – we have greater reach by saving people from having to travel locally and by promoting inclusivity for those who don’t live in Vancouver. However, the dialogue between panelists and audience sometimes gets lost a bit on Zoom.
The panel event, “The Relevancy of Public Policy in a Digital Age,” surprised many people who anticipated a more technical conversation. Instead they heard a conversation on social justice. I was surprised to hear that feedback but it was good to understand the expectation gap.
After our event on recognizing the rights of people who are transgender or gender non-conforming to express their gender identity on government-issued ID, I got feedback from a few people who felt that the panelists were just agreeing with each other and that there wasn’t enough diversity of opinion. My view is that we were united as a tiny minority of people trying to change the system over time. We had to stick together.
There’s an assumption that government or even academia is an old-school institution that is impervious to different ways of thinking about things and that change only happens when community-based advocates come in and break things apart. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to wait for the right job or a particular project to be a champion for social reform and social justice. Just make it part of the way you do things. The opportunity is there – you have to examine your assumptions, what you think is normal, and what’s considered received wisdom. We’re living in a century where the ideas of social justice, social reform, and equitable approaches to living are incredibly important.
As Canadians, we think we’re more socially progressive than our American counterparts but we found ourselves surprised at what happened with the convoys and such. And once again, this connects to the relevancy of public policy – it’s the battleground where ideas and values are contested.
SPPGA: You have been working on a model based on a mixed-methods approach to assess the impact of virtual care and digital health on equitable access. Could you tell us about your groundbreaking research project on virtual care?
My research on virtual care has three legs – and the literature review portion is now complete. I still need to complete a data analysis and my stakeholder engagement. I hope students realize all the amazing resources available to them at UBC. We have amazing librarians such as Ursula Ellis who took the time to walk me through some considerations for search engine research methodology. She kindly repeated that same tutorial for my Graduate Academic Assistants.
The students turned out a really impressive domestic and international literature scan on racialized populations in settler nation-states; in the modern Anglosphere, that’s Canada and the U.S.A. as well as Australia and New Zealand. The idea was to look at the impact of virtual care on how racialized people living in these countries access health care.
The students’ high quality literature review is a testament to the quality of teaching at SPPGA. They have good writing skills, as well as excellent research and analytical skills – these are key skills people look for in the public service when it comes to hiring.
The students and I talked about different biases and the one I taught them about was publication bias. Talking about failure is a real challenge in institutions in academia or in the public service. But without failure, you’re not learning anything and insulating yourself from taking thoughtful risks that might result in something amazing. Or maybe you have failed, but the culture doesn’t create space for talking about the failure. So I asked the students to look for examples about virtual care about failures, but they didn’t find a single instance, which seems absolutely impossible that hasn’t happened. That’s an example of publication bias, and something the students learned.
SPPGA: What new insights did you gain that you would like to apply as you return to your role at the Ministry of Health?
I really want to strengthen my engagement with academics at UBC as part of my external stakeholder engagement processes for policy development. I take an evidenced-based approach to policymaking – we think about the evidence as it relates to what we’re trying to solve, but academics don’t know when I’m using their work. So how do we strengthen relationships with academics who write these articles and are conducting research on issues we’re trying to solve? Can we can reach out to academics who do BC-based research relevant to our work to bring them into discussions?
And then in terms of the review of policies, I want to work with SPPGA and the School of Population and Public Health to gain feedback. How do we strengthen the synergies between what’s being researched and the pressing policy issues that we’re trying to deal with? Although we have strong policy minds focusing on all the different parts of government; it took me coming to UBC fully realize how vital it is to incorporate all the interesting work that is happening with academics.
I also liked the contemplative aspect of the academic lifestyle. I’m not sure how I can apply this to my work in government but I’m certainly going to try!
SPPGA: What is your advice to future SPPGA Practitioner Fellows?
Build relationships with faculty members as early as you can and ask lots of questions. Being able to consider research questions outside of the boundaries of your normal public service day job is a huge opportunity, and having the space to find the right questions to ask in the space and freedom of academia is really cool.
Don’t underestimate the value of talks – they’re fun to organize, you learn a lot from many different voices, and it was gratifying to see how excited people were about them.
At the end of the day, consider how you’re contributing back – because there is so much opportunity to do that along with the gift of learning. Honestly, it was such a gift, so thank you.
Natasha, thank you for sharing your valuable time and insights with SPPGA!
