Paper People poem and video honours those lost to poisonous drugs

September 6, 2023

In 2021, 263 paper medical charts were shipped to East Kootenay Regional Hospital where they were placed in the basement. The charts belonged to people who had died from toxic drugs, and were sent to the hospital for a project designed to better understand and address the failure of systems to prevent these deaths.

Alison Ko, who was at the time a long-term Interior Health employee, joined the project team which needed someone with a nursing background.

What she felt was a good career opportunity became so much more. “I had no idea how intense reviewing charts would be,” says Alison. “As our team worked diligently to capture the data the charts revealed, we felt the deep impact of the lives lost.”

Alison recalls going into the basement and pulling out the charts, one by one, and reading the files for hours. “Our team met every week, and we kept saying that there are all these stories. They touched us deeply. I started jotting them down, and keeping a journal – anonymous of course."

With her background in creative writing, Alison decided to shape the stories into a poem she called Paper People. “I felt like I needed to do good for these families and the people who died,” she explains. “The other guiding force behind the poem was how do we address stigma? How can I use poetry to connect with readers, and have people reflect on these preventable deaths? And lastly, I also wanted to honour the work the team was doing.”

A woman with long black hair wearing a white v-neck t-shirt, jeans and silver jewellery stands against a brick wall holding a black, oval naloxone kit — Alison holds a naloxone kit in a picture taken for an Interior Health harm reduction awareness campaign

One of the project’s deliverables was to use the data and lessons learned from the chart review to educate others. Out of conversations with colleagues and coworkers emerged the idea of using visual storytelling to share some of the team’s findings. The Paper People video project was born.

With the help of the creative team at Hello Cool World, Paper People became reality in just over three weeks. Now on YouTube, the video can be shared by anyone to help combat stigma and understand the human stories behind the medical charts.

In this Story…

The poem

The creative team behind the video

Resources

The poem

Paper People

The worst headache
Pain beyond 60 seconds
Aches do not fit their criteria

I used to put a voice to the people who are now dead
Hear the stories of those who would come to our emergency rooms
A mother, father, sister, brother, auntie, daughter, uncle, son
An entrepreneur, a new Canadian, a Knowledge Keeper, an unlucky athlete

Exhale Inhale

How do we look at our lives when we witness the dead?
Take care of their graves?
Bring flowers
Sweep away dry leaves
Bring back Goya to tell their story

I can capture their desperation
Illuminate their resilience
As they sought out some way to feel whole
To find their way back to who they once were
When they cared for their babies
When they could work a full shift
They want to have the life they had before
Contact
Before their accident
Before the death of their child
Before the loss of their business
Before their adult children began to organize their lives

Placing paper files into boxes
To be sent away to Iron Mountain
Record Name Date of Birth Number of Contacts with Interior Health Pain Referrals Income
Data matters

The family wants to know
Could they stay a bit longer?
Could their organs be donated?
They want us to know they were trying
They moved back home
Started a new job
Returned to school
Were working on their thesis

The family wants us to know

The creative team behind the video

Paper People was produced a Hello Cool World, a Vancouver-based creative and digital agency that focuses on health and wellness, harm reduction and social justice.

We interviewed three of the people who brought Alison’s poem to life. Here are their reflections on how they created Paper People, and what the video means to them.

Katherine (Kat) Dodds, Founder, Hello Cool World

“I’ve never been asked to do something exactly like this, but Paper People is exactly what I’ve wanted to do forever and ever. It’s heartfelt and creative.

We wanted to really create that emotional layer across the video with the one objective of making people feel something about those who died. We also wanted it to be cathartic for those who worked on the chart review team as it was an expression of how they were feeling.

The project was cathartic to our team as well. We’ve worked on other projects and have lost people, we’ve lost family members. So it hits close to home. It’s a heartfelt experience of what qualitative evidence looks like, not just quantitative.”

Terry Sunderland, Senior Graphic Designer and Illustrator

“Paper People is about issues that are really important to Kat and me, and that we address daily in our work, either adjacent or directly. Because the poem is about personal pain, the pain of discovery and the feeling of tragic secrets revealed, it made it possible for us to throw open the gates of metaphor and vision.

We grabbed on early to a couple of interesting references. One, the fact that this was about these files that embodied people that were like souls stored in a basement. We worked with the poignancy of that image.

The second was the reference to Goya. We immediately thought of the Goya etchings that bear witness to tragedies, and the anonymity and human aftermath of war. Alison’s poem seemed to be about this as well.”

Gui Novi, Musician, Owner of NineAudio

“I spent a lot of time researching instruments that would create a feeling that we are in the same world. I started with one chord in F-sharp minor, a sad key that isn’t melodic or harmonic. We figured out what emotions we wanted listeners to hear.

I’ve worked on a number of projects that deal with health issues, mental health and drug use. This topic is very provocative to me. I always saw the [toxic drug crisis] as a big metropolitan problem. I come from Brazil which has many social and drug issues, but not an opioid crisis. It’s been revealing and unsettling to me to come to Canada and these kind of issues in this volume and out of control.”