Kate Collie
oncology
University of Alberta
Canada
Biography
Kate Collie received an MA in Counselling Psychology and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Health Psychology from the University of British Columbia with specializations in distance service delivery and arts in healthcare. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psycho-oncology at the Center for Stress & Health in the Department of Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Research Interest
Dr. Collie has extensive experience in the development, implementation and evaluation of psychosocial oncology services that can be delivered from a distance and of arts-based versions of existing psychosocial oncology services. In both cases the goal is to make psychosocial support more widely available. Dr. Collie has worked with Canadian and international teams in both of these areas and since 1998 has been doing pioneering work that combines the two. She has been collaborating with the BC Cancer Agency and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary to develop online art groups for young adults with cancer. Distance Delivery: The value of professionally led support groups for people living with cancer has been demonstrated in controlled studies – that have shown significant reductions in pain and psychological distress, significant improvements in quality of life, and some improvements in immune function and survival time – and in uncontrolled studies and evaluations of community-based cancer support programs. The benefits are known and interest is high but there are many barriers to support group participation. Some patients cannot get to cancer centres where professionally led support groups are held. Some experience levels of fatigue that make it hard leave home; others are constrained by caregiving responsibilities. Some cancer centres do not have support groups or only offer them during regular working hours. Stigma is a further impediment. Dr. Collie is a member of the steering committee for CancerChatCanada, a pan-Canadian development initiative that has a mandate to make the benefits of professionally led cancer support groups available to more people in Canada. Online support groups are offered through CancerChatCanada using live chat. Dr. Collie has also been involved in research about distance delivery of psychosocial oncology services using videoconferencing. She has provided instruction in email counselling through TherapyOnline and the University of Toronto Department of Social Work as part of her interest in low-tech approaches to distance service delivery. Arts-based Services: Arts-based support services such as art therapy, music therapy, writing groups and story-telling can benefit people affected by cancer in a wide variety of ways. They are particularly useful for relieving trauma symptoms associated with life-threatening illness and for expressing complex emotions that are hard to put into words. They have an important role to play in expanding the reach of psychosocial services for people affected by cancer because they provide opportunities for non-verbal communication. Art groups can be an attractive alternative to standard support groups for people who are not comfortable talking about emotions with people they are meeting for the first time or who are not fluent in the language being used. Dr. Collie began developing her specialization in the use of the arts in cancer care in 1994 and has worked in this area in a variety of capacities. Recently she has been using her own collaborative art projects as a basis for developing assistive art services for cancer patients who have physical limitations.
