Nurses specializing in critical care handle the most severe cases in hospitals. Typically, they undergo additional training beyond their initial four-year nursing education to work in intensive care units (ICUs). During the COVID-19 pandemic, shortage of ICU-trained nurses led to non-ICU-trained nurses having to care for these patients. Anecdotal evidence suggests following the pandemic, many ICU-nurses have resigned because they experienced significant moral distress due to feeling unprepared to provide safe and ethical care. This has worsened the shortage of ICU-trained nurses particularly at Abbotsford Regional Hospital.
The federal Chief Nursing Officer released a toolkit on nursing retention, but its recommendations are broad, thus tailoring to suit specific practice environments is needed. We propose this convening and collaborating grant to bring together ICU-trained nurses and managers to brainstorm strategies tailored to retain ICU-trained nurses. We will develop an evidence-informed, nurse centred implementation research roadmap to support the recruitment and retention of ICU-trained nurses within Fraser Health, with a specific focus on Abbotsford Hospital due to its rural location and unique challenges.
In rural and remote communities across North Vancouver Island, there is a growing number of older adults who need supports to stay at home. This region has a disproportionately higher proportion of older adults in the province. With changing demographics due to out-migration of young workers (for urban job opportunities) and in-migration of older adults (due to lower cost of living and desirable retirement area), keeping up with services has been more challenging than in other places.
This project seeks to build community-engaged patient-oriented research partnerships with social-sector agencies, service providers, private businesses, government partners, and people from local communities in rural and remote locations within North Vancouver Island. Together, we will gather uncertainties facing vulnerable older adults in rural and remote communities about staying at home, and jointly plan a co-design workshop to develop a plan to engage researchers, research users, and funders with our findings.
Project outcomes include 1) research agenda on aging at home in rural and remote communities; and 2) network of partners and collaborators for future research and grant applications.
In a public health emergency, government health communicators must disseminate information in a rapidly evolving scenario. In such urgent situations, reaching priority populations and addressing their needs is challenging. However, in a multicultural landscape as British Columbia (BC), considering different groups’ perspectives is essential to engage them in public health measures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, civil society organizations (CSOs) serving immigrant populations filled this gap by implementing multilingual and culturally relevant communications strategies.
We propose to bring together communicators from health authorities, CSO staff, and community-based researchers to share knowledge on their experiences in communicating with immigrant groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal is to create a collaborative network to develop strategies to engage CSOs in public health communications in future emergencies in BC. We also aim to develop a research agenda with priority areas in health communication involving immigrant populations. Through convening and creating a knowledge basis, we will contribute to enhancing BC’s preparedness for future health emergency situations.
Over 2 million Canadians visit emergency departments each year because of adverse drug events (ADEs)—unintentional harms caused by outpatient medications. ADEs leads to over 700,000 hospital stays and cost more than $1 billion in healthcare expenses annually. These issues are especially severe in the Interior Health Authority, where an aging population and high rates of chronic diseases increase the risk of ADEs. Effective drug monitoring is essential for detecting and preventing these events. However, current reporting systems are underused due to their complexity and lack of integration with existing medical records to benefit clinical practices.
This C2 grant will enable our team at Interior Health to collaborate with researchers, healthcare providers, health system leaders, and policymakers to identify solutions and co-create a research agenda aligned with provincial health priorities using Menear’s framework of learning health system. The goal is to enhance patient safety by improving the documentation and communication of ADEs through digital innovations. This initiative not only addresses immediate local needs but also contributes to broader provincial health research goals.
This project aims to support community and patient partner engagement in the development of our rural clinical trials program. Clinical trials are an important aspect of medical research as they advance therapeutic options and improve health care outcomes. Unfortunately, most clinical trials are conducted in urban centres making results from the studies difficult to generalize in the rural setting. Additionally, people from rural communities face significant challenges when looking to participate in clinical trials. To promote equity in clinical trial access, and to create evidence to inform health care delivery in rural communities, our team is building a clinical trial program in the rural community of Cranbrook, B.C. We will develop tools, resources, and knowledge to share with other rural communities wanting to participate in clinical trials. We will work collaboratively with knowledge users such as rural patients, families, clinicians, decision makers, institutions (i.e., UBC and College of the Rockies), local Indigenous Peoples, and the Interior Health Authority to identify research priorities, guide clinical trial implementation, promote community engagement, and ensure the project is responsive to local community needs.
Stimulants (i.e. cocaine and methamphetamine) are increasingly detected in drug toxicity (i.e. overdose) deaths in BC. Our recent analyses reveal high rates of chronic disease among people who have died of stimulant and;or opioid overdose in BC. For example, we identified high rates of heart disease and mental illness among people who experienced stimulant overdose. These analyses suggest possible opportunities for intervention across the health system in chronic disease care, to reduce overdose risk.
At the Provincial Health Services Authority, a new data platform holds health records for emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and primary care visits for all BC residents. In the context of rising stimulant use in BC, and this new data source, there is an opportunity to use these data to fill knowledge gaps on stimulant use and overdose risk in BC.
We aim to address this knowledge gap by bringing together a group of people with lived and living experience of stimulant use to form a Peer Advisory Group. The group will advise on how these data can be used to investigate the intersections of chronic health conditions and overdose risk, with attention to the specific risks faced by people who use stimulants.
Burnout and suffering in health professionals reached epidemic proportions during the COVID-19 pandemic: between 60-80% of Canadian physicians reported burnout in 2021 (up from 30% in 2018) and 47% met the criteria for depression, while 75% of nurses experienced burnout. Mindfulness-based interventions have been shown to decrease burnout and increase resilience and meaning in health professionals. However, further evidence is needed around its long-term impact.
We seek to close this gap by bringing together a collaborative team to co-develop a program of research that investigates the effectiveness of an intensive mindfulness meditation retreat and subsequent community of practice as a therapeutic intervention to improve wellbeing in healthcare professionals.
With research users and trainees, we will develop a study protocol that uses quantitative and qualitative design and analysis (using narrative interviews and clinical surveys) to evaluate the effects of a 5 day retreat, with follow-up at 1, 6 and 12 months. We will work together to ensure our engagement and the research are equitable, accessible, and inclusive for diverse healthcare professionals, and will identify funding opportunities to move our collaboration forward.
Healthcare is one of the largest industrial contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, and is responsible for 5.2% of national emissions. We are also increasingly aware of the health impacts of climate change, which disproportionately affect older adults. Long-term care homes (LTC) homes, where frail older adults requiring complex care receive round-the-clock nursing care, are a critical component of the healthcare continuum of services. Yet, in comparison to hospitals, the LTC home sector receives relatively little attention in climate policy or research. The purpose of this project is to (a) assess climate readiness of the LTC home sector in British Columbia and (b) identify priorities for research, policy and practice in this area. We will assess climate readiness by: (1) conducting a cross-sectional survey of LTC homes in British Columbia to collect information related to sustainability and climate readiness, and (2) have a sub-set of LTC homes complete the Long-term Care Scorecard developed by the Canadian Coalition for Green Healthcare. After gathering this information, we will hold a virtual summit to share the findings and develop climate readiness priorities for research, policy and practice.
Rates of food insecurity reached an all-time high in 2023, where over 21% of people in BC and almost 9 million Canadians, including 2.1 million children, now live without stable access to food. Our team has spent decades doing research that repeatedly finds that food insecurity is a symptom of poverty that must be addressed by better social policies. Health researchers (like us) naively thought that once we showed the evidence about the causes and solutions to food insecurity, it would change the hearts and minds of policy makers and the public. But research alone has not been enough. Our goal now is to bring together researchers, artists, health professionals and community members to come up with new ways to do research and evaluate its impact that includes making art, writing stories and testing research approaches that will get people talking about and sharing evidence about the causes of food insecurity and about what we can do to make sure no one ever goes hungry. This project will build new research skills among students, researchers and community partners, spark change in research approaches and bring communities and scholars together in new ways to better address the crisis of food insecurity in British Columbia.
Children in foster and kinship (i.e. cared for by a non-relative and a relative, respectively) families often experience health and developmental concerns. Sleep is essential for health and development, yet little is known about foster;kinship family sleep. The insights of the foster;kinship community are needed to develop sleep research (and a sleep resource) that is useful, meaningful, and relevant to foster;kinship families. We will bring together an Indigenous elder, foster;kinship caregivers, adults with childhood foster;kinship experiences, community organizations, healthcare professionals, and researchers to co-develop a sleep health research agenda and co-design a sleep resource blueprint to support foster;kinship family sleep health in British Columbia. We will offer foundational training to build our partners’ (e.g. foster;kinship caregivers, adults who experienced childhood foster;kinship placements, graduate trainee) capacity and will hold seven virtual team engagement sessions. This project will result in a research agenda and tailored sleep resource that are relevant to the foster;kinship community, which will lead to increased uptake of future findings and ultimately better sleep health for foster;kinship families.
