Dr. Shannon Dames knows what it's like to suffer work-related burnout. She says she's fallen into a pit of despair several times during her career as a nurse and health administrator.

Dames has turned her experiences into a field of study that has led to a five year, $450,000 dollar grant from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the Lotte and John Hecht Memorial Foundation. Dames and a team of researchers at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo have developed a 12-week program for health care workers that uses ketamine and group therapy.

She says health care workers are the perfect cohort for her research:

Dames says she chose ketamine for the therapeutic program because it is the only legal medicine that produces psychedelic effects and its effects are not long lasting. Ketamine is widely used as anesthesia for both children and animals. Dames says in her program, ketamine is used to break through the barriers patients have used to push down their emotions and their trauma, while the group therapy teaches resilience and a different way of seeing the world.  The first, small group of 16 health care workers has completed the twelve week course of treatment, offered through Vancouver Island University. Dames says a second cohort of 50 is about to get underway.

She says the new grant money will allow for a peer reviewed study and will lead to the first certificate program in Canada for therapists and other health care providers:

Dames expects the certificate program for health practitioners to learn to deliver the Ketamine-based therapy will be offered at Vancouver Island University by January of 2022.