For the past 20 years, Professor Isabelle Giroux, a dietitian at the School of Nutrition Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, has been interested in the active offer of healthcare services in Francophone minority-language settings.
Active offer does not simply mean greeting patients with “Bonjour/Hello”: it also involves adopting a holistic approach, such as recording their preferred official language in their health records and providing them with documents and follow-up services in their language of choice, among other forms of assistance.
Giroux has noted significant shortcomings in the training of future social and healthcare providers in this regard. In addition to providing synchronous simulations, the researcher and her interprofessional team have created, in partnership with CAN-Sim, a dozen virtual training modules that have sparked interest from several universities, colleges and healthcare institutions across Canada. Other modules designed for Francophone and Anglophone learners are currently in the works.
“I realized that we needed to fill in the gaps through education and research to develop the skills to actively provide services in French, effectively cooperate within healthcare teams, and support vulnerable members of minority-language communities,” says Giroux, whose research is funded by the Institut du Savoir Montfort and who co-leads the Groupe de recherche sur la formation et les pratiques en santé et service social en contexte francophone minoritaire (GReFoPS) at the University of Ottawa.
“This training aims to contribute to improving the quality, safety and equity of services provided to Francophones in minority language settings.”
Isabelle Giroux
— Professor in the School of Nutrition Sciences
Scenarios grounded in reality
Each learning module uses scenarios that are based on actual cases, such as that of a unilingual Francophone man who signs an English consent form for a medical procedure without fully understanding the risks, or a newcomer to Canada from a Francophone nation in Africa who presents with stomach pain at a healthcare clinic for the first time. These modules explore a variety of practical situations in a range of settings, including emergency rooms, pediatric wards and mental health clinics, to prepare students to actively offer services in both official languages in different circumstances.
This training, which is offered to students in a dozen health science, medical and social science programs, aims to “contribute to improving the quality, safety and equity of services provided to Francophones in minority language settings,” explains Giroux.
Benefits in professional settings
The training is already bearing fruit: Canadian colleges and universities are using these modules to prepare their health science students, and healthcare institutions are now using them to train their professional teams. The benefits are being felt well beyond the classroom.
Olivia Smith, a recent graduate of the School of Nursing at the University of Ottawa, is among some 840 students who have completed training on the active offer of services in interprofessional settings since 2023. She notes the benefits of this approach in her day-to-day work as a nurse at The Ottawa Hospital. Over half the patients in her specialized surgical unit are Francophone, and a quarter of them do not understand English. Up until very recently, the healthcare instructions these individuals received upon leaving the hospital were strictly in English.
“I started noticing that some patients would return to the hospital with complications, such as infections or open wounds, and I wondered whether they had really understood their care instructions,” Smith notes. She then decided to partner with a clinical educator to have these healthcare instructions translated into French. Today, she is proud to offer such instructions to patients in the official language of their choice.
Training under the microscope
In 2025, Giroux received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant to support, through a national partnership, institutions that wish to improve their training on active offer for current and future professionals. Eight Canadian colleges and universities, as well as healthcare facilities and community organizations, are currently participating in the project.
The research team will assess training on the active offer of health and social services through synchronous interprofessional simulations and virtual modules. It will determine if and how this approach helps current and future healthcare providers improve the active offer of services in French in healthcare settings.
In a first study, published in December 2025, some 216 trainees from nine different disciplines at the University of Ottawa assessed the effectiveness of training on the active offer of services in official languages using an interprofessional simulation module. These individuals were generally very pleased with the training: over 98% said they had gained a better understanding of the concepts involved in active offer and greater confidence in their ability to communicate with patients.
These initial results are promising for a project that mainly aims to raise awareness among healthcare providers of the importance of overcoming language barriers by training them on the active offer and interprofessional collaboration competencies. Equitable access to health care depends on it.