Year: 2019

Gout is a common and very painful type of joint disease caused by too much uric acid build up in the body. In 2012, our research team showed that gout affects over 171,000 people in BC and that hospital visits from gout has doubled from 2000 to 2011. This is alarming as the cause of gout is known and drugs that lower uric acid are available. Indeed, despite being a curable disease, gout has not been managed well.

In 2019, we completed research that showed that health professionals including rheumatologists, pharmacists, and dietitians remotely working together and sharing electronic medical records (EMR) is a feasible and effective way of caring for gout patients. It is important to continue to work towards implementing this promising approach to gout care. This includes involving family physicians who see the majority of gout patients as well as exploring access for gout patients living in both urban and rural areas.

Our proposed activities involve building partnerships with gout patients, health professionals, researchers, and EMR experts across BC to gather perspectives and expertise needed to inform and design future implementation research of this unique way of caring for gout patients. 

Rural communities in British Columbia (BC) face challenges in accessing care and services. Many rural and remote communities are First Nations, for whom geographic and resource inequities are compounded by sociopolitical and historical injustices. Equity considerations are critical to understanding the unique and diverse experiences and needs of rural communities. Research can help generate evidence, equity, and community-informed responses to the needs and priorities of rural communities. It can play a role in co-creating new ways of working together. Yet, BC has no coherent set of guidelines to inform efforts or investments in rural health research.

This C2 grant will bring people together to share their perspectives about the pressing research priorities for rural communities. Together, people who live and work in (or with) rural communities will articulate priorities for rural health research in BC. This early set of priorities will inform broader online dialogue, where people will collectively shape a vision for rural health research. The outcome will be an evidence and community-informed agenda for rural health research that can guide future directions for funders, researchers, health systems, and community partners.

Fifty years of infant and early childhood universal health care program evaluation has repeatedly demonstrated that effective early childhood services make a difference to secure more positive long-term health and wellbeing outcomes for children and their families. The early years are a critical period of transitions with fluctuating family needs. An array of services, each with its own structure and process exist. Children whose life circumstances are more complex will need additional support to help them to navigate what is already a challenging developmental journey. Such enhanced services should leverage connectivity by creating and enhancing opportunities for engagement and access despite contextual factors (i.e. rurality).

In addition, we are faced with a shift in the ways we have to work, financial and cost-saving plans, organisational restructuring and nuances linked to rural geography. What our team has come to learn is that in applying services from urban centres there is a lack in understanding the unique environmental factors, fiscal vulnerability, and cultural complexities in the north. Using our completed rapid realist review, as a starting point, we want to engage with a broader community to understand enhanced service needs for the north. Using a systems and compassionate leadership stakeholder approach, we wish to join enhanced service work streams across health, municipalities, social care and not-for-profit organisations.

In Canada, there has been a profound disconnect between emergency services and mental health services for youth and young adults. Recent evidence suggests that more than half of Canadian youth and young adults presenting to an Emergency Department (ED) with mental health and substance use (MHSU) needs have not had any previous mental health-related contact with the health care system.

In BC, the opioid epidemic has compounded this crisis, with youth and young adults accounting for 20-25% of all opioid-related overdoses and deaths. From coast to coast, there is an immediate need to improve referral to integrated youth and young adult services to limit repeated ED visits and hospitalization for MHSU disorders and to promote the health and well-being of this population. The goal of our work is to build a partnership in BC between a network of EDs and an integrated youth and young adult health services network called Foundry.

Specifically, we propose to coalesce a group of patients and their family, service providers, clinicians, and physicians for a one-day workshop to inform the development of an intervention (ED2Foundry) designed to improve the linkages between EDs and community health services for youth and young adults with MHSU concerns.  

Communication is central to everyday life. It is essential for maintaining relationships with family and friends and for participating in community, social, and leisure activities. In older adults, communication is particularly important because of the increased risk for social isolation and depression. A major contributor to communication disorders in BC is dementia, which has an estimated prevalence of 62,000. Most people with dementia (PWD) experience communication difficulties early on, making it a high priority for intervention.  

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are the health professionals with specialist knowledge in managing communication disorders. There is a strong evidence base for the provision of nonpharmacological interventions to address the communication needs of PWD and their families. However, SLPs report many barriers to implementing these interventions and PWD seldom have access to evidence-based communication care. There is a need to narrow this evidence-to-practice gap. We plan to create a collaboration between clinical research users and researchers to identify the barriers and facilitators to implementing evidence-based communication care in BC and to develop a set of research priorities for this area.   

Vaccine research projects have traditionally been designed by researchers with/without policymakers or doctors and without public involvement – the very people we are trying to protect from serious infections. In this project we will bring together groups of people with interest and expertise in vaccine research.

Our goal is to develop a plan for future vaccine research projects which is relevant to everyone – researchers, the public, public health and government officials who decide immunization programs and doctors. We will include trainees to ensure we are leaving the next generation in safe hands. We will first arrange a meeting of people from these different groups to discuss vaccine research priorities. We will then carry out a survey to include opinions from those who could not be included in the meeting.

Finally, we will bring the results of the survey to a final meeting where we would like to end up with at least 2-3 projects which address the identified BC vaccine research priorities – we will then try to obtain funding for these projects. This process will create a new group of people who we hope will work together for many years to come and make sure that vaccine research in BC remains relevant for everyone.