Improving Health Systems and Services through Patient, Provider, and Researcher Connections
08/10/2021
Newly funded
studies by the Canadian
Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) at Bruyère are aimed at improving Canada’s
health systems and services.
Dr. Clare Liddy will be leading a project to improve
access to specialized care for patients with frailty using eConsult. As her
research team notes, over 1.5 million Canadians currently live with
frailty, and those who do are more likely to
experience poor health outcomes when faced with stressors, including COVID-19. One
of the challenges to care delivery for this group is accessing timely advice
and support from experts. Leveraging the
well-established eConsult platform, which allows primary care providers to securely
communicate online with over 100 specialty groups, the team will look to
incorporate frailty eConsult services with linkage to specialists, allied
health professionals, and community services specifically targeting needs of
older adults with frailty across multiple provinces and creating a national
database to support analysis and creation of tools to assist health care
providers identify and manage frailty.
The research
team includes Pamela Jarrett, Isabelle Vedel, Sandra Magalhaes, Sathya Karunananthan, Jatinderpreet
Singh, Barbara Farrell, Arya
Rahgozar, Lisa McCarthy, Douglas Archibald, Deanne Houghton,
James LaPlante, Celeste Fung, Maxine Dumas Pilon, Mohamed Gazarin, Samira
Abbasgolizadeh Rahimi, Claire Godard-Sebillotte, Amy Hsu, Howard Bergman, Bryn Robinson, Chantal Backman, Simone
Dahrouge, Benoît Robert, Jacinthe Savard, Mylaine Breton, Shirley Bush, Erin Keely, and Catherine
Caron.
The engagement
of the public, patients, their families, health professionals, and others
(stakeholders) in research is valued and important, and while stakeholder engagement
in systematic reviews enhances relevance, quality, impact, there is a gap in
understanding how to best engage these groups in health care systematic
reviews. Dr. Peter Tugwell and the research team aim to develop guidance on
methods of stakeholder engagement and evaluation of stakeholder engagement in
systematic reviews and to develop and adapt existing reporting guidelines. The team will be consulting directly
with a wide number of health care stakeholders to co-produce a strategy that
focused on barriers and facilitators for stakeholder engagement for maximum
impact. Involvement of the public, patients, health professionals in the
systematic review process has great potential to improve overall health
outcomes and avoid research waste.
The research team includes Vivian Welch, Maureen Smith, Alison
Riddle, Jennifer Petkovic, Olivia Magwood, Leonila Dans, Stephanie
Chang, Elie Akl, Anneliese Synnot, Thomas Concannon, Marc Avey, Lara Maxwell,
Janet Jull, Davina Ghersi, Alba Antequera, Roslyn Parker, Holder Schunemann,
Eve Tomlinson, Glen Hazlewood, Jennifer Hilgart, Neal Haddaway, Omar Dewidar, Alex Pollock, Ian Graham,
Christopher Mccutcheon, Joanne Khabsa, Karine Toupin April, and Elisabeth Tanjong Ghogomu.