Research Location: University of British Columbia - Vancouver Campus

The Lancet Commission on Sustainable Healthcare (LCSH) is an expert collaborative of academics, ministries of health, and sustainable healthcare program leaders tackling issues of appropriate consumption and environmental emissions from healthcare activities to define best practices for low-carbon, sustainable, and resilient care. The LCSH works to develop evidence-based guidance and standardized indicators, informing implementation policies across diverse resource settings and engaging diverse stakeholders, including policy makers, industry leaders, healthcare administrators, health professionals, educators, and the population at large. Following the 2025 launch of our original work in the Lancet, the LCSH will disseminate report outputs through a social media campaign, at major global events, and via a speaking tour, with a focus on strategically-designed toolkits adapting our empirical evidence to guide implementation in real-world healthcare environments. Our work will form the basis of a new division of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, allowing annual monitoring and reporting of relevant metrics toward sustainable health systems transformation.

Endometriosis affects approximately 2 million people in Canada. Despite the high prevalence of this condition, a lack of awareness, normalization of painful and debilitating symptoms, and ongoing medical discrimination remain. Racialized communities, including Asian populations, face additional barriers to diagnosis and care. Asian individuals, compared to their White counterparts are more likely to have their endometriosis-related pain dismissed by healthcare providers and have a higher burden of disease before referral. We aim to share findings from our EndoPhoto research, utilizing images, text, and narratives from East, South, and Southeast Asian individuals to depict their experiences with endometriosis before, during, and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. Our research highlights mental health challenges, the complex symptom burden, healthcare access barriers, and coping strategies employed for self-care and seeking support. We plan to (1) develop an interactive website to showcase the EndoPhoto study findings, and (2) share the website via a social media campaign. Sharing this research will address a significant gap in knowledge around endometriosis experiences generally, and for Asian individuals specifically.

Improving the health and wellbeing of older adults in British Columbia (B.C.), whether living free of, or with, chronic disease, is a major public health priority. This is because declines in health and well-being have significant individual, family, social, and economic impacts. There is evidence from research studies that certain environmental, social, and life style factors may promote health as we age. Yet, there remains a wide gap in sharing this information with older adults and their care partners, especially those who are geographically or socially harder to reach. Our goal is to use multiple strategies to share research evidence related to healthy aging with all older adults in B.C., and it starts with collaborating with organizations that serve them. Through these collaborations, we will co-create an online web resource to broadly share information. We will also host healthy aging public presentation sessions and start a podcast series to enable more in-depth sharing of information and direct interaction between older adults and researchers. By sharing information on healthy aging, we aim to promote health and well-being among older British Columbians, and bridge the gap between healthspan and lifespan.

The sympto-thermal method (STM) helps prevent unplanned pregnancy by increasing a woman’s awareness of when she is most fertile. It uses body observations such as cervical mucus and body temperature. The STM can help women who do not use other birth control methods. For example, those with specific religious or cultural beliefs. This is more likely in newcomers to BC. Other methods of fertility awareness, such as detection strips, are expensive. Past research has shown that the STM is an effective option with no side effects. However, the main problem is that people do not get enough STM education from trained instructors. In BC, STM instruction is provided by the Catholic church, which limits the availability of this knowledge. Our project aims to address this by translating the STM research evidence into education for BC newcomers. This includes newcomer women and gender-diverse people assigned female at birth and their partners. We will partner with a community organization and people with lived experience. This will ensure the free education is relevant, accessible and respectful of different cultures and backgrounds. When people have access to evidence-based birth control options, they can make informed pregnancy decisions.

The proposal aims to create extended lay abstracts for approximately 80 research papers produced by our lab that focus on Interventional Brain Medicine technologies. These abstracts will translate complex research outcomes into easily understandable summaries for non-specialists. This project aims to disseminate knowledge away from an in-group of academics and towards the broader population and public policy it hopes to serve. Each week, trainees, patient partners, and research co-leads work in tandem through an iterative process of revisions and open discussions to produce easily comprehensible layman translations of technical academic work. These lay abstracts serve the purpose of narrowing the knowledge-practice gap by encouraging public engagement in research through their publication on open-access platforms such as X and Research Gate as well as the lab’s website and monthly newsletter. In the creation of lay summaries and KT, public and professional perception for these novel methods is to be improved, guiding their future accessibility and easing the burden of illness on a scale both within and outside of BC through the empowering nature of open collaboration with the public.

The purpose of this project is to evaluate and disseminate a novel, animated, educational video about unwanted, intrusive thoughts (UITs) of infant-related harm, and their relationship with mental health and infant safety. To our knowledge, this is the only educational video on this topic.

Our primary aim is to distribute the video to audiences throughout BC, including pregnant and postpartum people, their families, care providers and organizations involved in providing care to perinatal people.

Prior to dissemination, we will evaluate the video by administering it to pregnant people to see if it reduces postpartum mental health symptoms which can arise in response to UITs of infant-related harm. One half of study participants will view our video and the other half will view a different video not related to infant harm. We expect that participants who view our video will experience fewer UITs of infant harm, find them less distressing, and report fewer symptoms of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Testing allows us to share the video with confidence, knowing it is effective in improving parents’ mental health.

In 2016, the BC government declared a public health emergency because of high numbers of people experiencing overdoses, mostly from opioids like fentanyl and heroin. Since that time, the number of overdoses among youth between the ages of 12-24 has been steadily increasing. This has taken a significant toll on youth and their caregivers and communities.

Overdoses can be avoided by providing youth with the help they need, as early as possible. However, youth who use drugs like fentanyl and heroin face a lot of challenges accessing services and supports. To address this problem, our team has worked with experts to create a model of care that is more aligned with the needs of youth who use opioids.

The next step of this project is to share this model of care with service providers in different regions of British Columbia. We will also gather feedback on how well this model of care fits service providers’ local experiences. This project will help service providers and policy makers put this model of care into practice so that youth who use opioids can get help more quickly.

The proposed activities build on the results from the CCEDARR project, which explored how the lessons learned from the pandemic could be applied in resilient responses to climate change in rural Canada. The findings of this qualitative work suggest that community connection and rural networks are influential to rural community resilience, whether in response to the pandemic or challenges related to climate change. As a result, the overarching objective of this work is to support networks of engaged advocates who have the potential to be key leaders in climate change and health. This grant would support two events to bring together youth, secondary school educators, medical students, and rural physicians to strengthen relationships within a multidisciplinary framework and develop climate change education, all while fostering youth leadership. In addition, the grant would support the research and writing of an online learning hub focused on sharing strategies for rural resilience in response to climate change and its impacts on rural health systems. This work would be completed in partnership with educators and medical students and include the outcomes of the proposed networking events.