Author: psifoundation

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Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw: 2024 PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation (KT) Fellowship Recipient

“Patients and caregivers are a primary source of wisdom about how their healthcare could be better. This project puts them in the driver’s seat, identifying which areas of care should be improved first.”  – Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw

PSI Foundation is pleased to announce Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw as the recipient of the 2024 PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation (KT) Fellowship.

About Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw

Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw is a General Internal Medicine Physician and Clinician Scientist at the University Health Network. She is also an Adjunct Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). She was awarded a CIHR-IHSPR Rising Star Award in 2019 and holds over $600,000 in CIHR funding as principal applicant. Her research focuses on the quality of in-hospital and outpatient care, as well as the organization of physician services.

About the PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship

Knowledge translation research aims at transitioning research discoveries to the real world to improve health outcomes. The PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship – valued at $300,000 for over two or three years – helps protect a promising new clinician investigator’s research time, allowing the Fellow to undertake high-impact translational research in Ontario.

Dr. Lapointe-Shaw highlights the importance of supporting early career physician researchers.

“The PSI Graham Farquharson KT Fellowship offers much-needed stability to early physician researchers, allowing them time to focus on their research and KT work. This time is pivotal to launching one’s career.”

Fellowship Funds to be Used for Quality Improvement on General Medical Wards

General medical wards care for patients admitted to hospital for common conditions such as heart failure, lung disease, pneumonia and falls. The number of patients cared for on such wards has increased over the past decade, and is expected to continue to grow in line with population aging. Learning what matters most to patients and their families can provide direction to quality improvement efforts. This project will elicit patient and caregiver priorities for improvement on general medical hospital wards, in order to drive quality improvement that is aligned with their preferences.

Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw and her team will use group concept mapping to first elicit contributors to the patient and caregiver experience, and then ask patients and caregivers to rate and sort these ideas to create a map of key concepts, and to identify the top priorities for quality improvement. Throughout all steps of the process, they will focus on recruiting a diverse group of participants, to reflect the broad experience and perspectives of the general medical community.

The Ontario General Medicine Quality Improvement Network (GEMQIN) is an Ontario Health-funded program that brings together clinicians and administrators from Ontario hospitals to improve the quality of care provided on general medical wards. All data and reporting in GeMQIN is produced by GEMINI, Canada‘s largest hospital data research network. The outputs of group concept mapping will be used to develop new quality indicators for GEMQIN physician and hospital performance reports, as well as improvement initiatives in the general medical healthcare community.

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Dr. Michael Fralick: 2024 PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation (KT) Fellowship Recipient

“As a general internist who sees many patients with chronic diseases like diabetes, heart failure, obesity, and chronic kidney disease, the existence of medications like SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP1 analogues is a revelation; the slow uptake, however, is challenging. I strongly believe that this dedicated knowledge translation program—informed by stakeholder perspectives, policy process insights, behavioural science, and diverse stakeholder support—can have a meaningful impact on the prescribing of these medications and, consequently, a significant impact on the lives of the almost 35% of Ontarians living with the abovementioned conditions. I am honoured to be a PSI Graham Farquharson KT Fellow, and I look forward to pursuing this work.” – Dr. Michael Fralick

PSI Foundation is pleased to announce Dr. Michael Fralick as the recipient of the 2024 PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship.

About Dr. Michael Fralick

Dr. Michael Fralick is a Clinician Scientist at Sinai Health and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He also works clinically at the Sault Area Hospital in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. To date, he has published over 160 papers, with over 80 as first or senior author. His research focuses on integrating pharmacoepidemiology with machine learning to understand the safety and effectiveness of medications for adults living with diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

About the PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship

Knowledge translation research aims at transitioning research discoveries to the real world to improve health outcomes. The PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship – valued at $300,000 for over two or three years – helps protect a promising new clinician investigator’s research time, allowing the Fellow to undertake high-impact translational research in Ontario.

Dr. Fralick highlights the significance of salary support awards for early career physician researchers.

“Salary support for physician researchers at the early career level is invaluable. Protected time is incredibly important to break through the competing demands and endless pursuit of funding and allow physician researchers to focus on achieving impactful, timely results. What’s more, having this dedicated time early in one’s career creates opportunities for generating research outputs, establishing collaborations, and pursuing professional development, all of which lay the foundation for a successful research program moving forward.”

Fellowship Funds to be Used to Improve Uptake of Novel Diabetes Medications

SGLT2 inhibitors (SGLT2s) and GLP1 analogues (GLP1s) are prescription medications for patients with type 2 diabetes proven to reduce the risk of heart failure, kidney failure, stroke, heart attack, and death. Even in patients without diabetes, these medications reduce the risk of heart failure and end-stage kidney disease, and in patients with obesity, GLP1s can reduce body weight by up to 15%. However, these medications are not being prescribed to patients as often as one might expect, considering their impressive benefits. The aim of this project is to improve the uptake of SGLT2s and GLP1s for adults with and without diabetes in Ontario. Slow adoption is common for new treatments, and a dedicated effort to understand why prescribing rates are low is the first step to making a change. Dr. Fralick and his team will speak with doctors and other healthcare providers in both urban and rural areas of Ontario to understand their perceptions of these medications, and what barriers might exist to prescribing them. Based on these insights, they will pursue various approaches to improve prescribing, including reports that show doctors how their prescribing rates compare to their colleagues, freely accessible prescribing tools for doctors, educational materials, dedicated presentations, and a twice-monthly newsletter.

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Dr. Carolyn Snider: 2024 PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation (KT) Fellowship Recipient

Dr. Carolyn Snider’s research and outreach programs in Ontario’s emergency departments are addressing the profound impact of social determinants on health. By focusing on initiatives for vulnerable populations, her work shows promise in improving health outcomes and optimizing healthcare use in the region, emphasizing the need to redefine the role of outreach workers in healthcare. Through her PSI fellowship, Dr. Snider aims to refine these programs, secure sustainable funding, and establish a healthcare environment where ED outreach workers are recognized as essential for delivering patient care and achieving long-term health improvements for Ontarians.

PSI Foundation is pleased to announce Dr. Carolyn Snider as the recipient of the 2024 PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship.

About Dr. Carolyn Snider

Dr. Carolyn Snider is an Emergency Physician and Clinician Scientist at Unity Health Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Emergency Medicine, and is cross-appointed to the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation (IHPME). To date, Dr. Snider has published more than 42 papers and secured over $8 million in competitive research funding (over $2.5 million as principal investigator). Her work focuses on developing, implementing, and evaluating approaches in providing more equitable emergency department care for those experiencing marginalization.

About the PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship

The PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship is intended to provide salary support for a mid-career physician researcher in Ontario, who has demonstrated the ability to successfully complete high impact knowledge translation research. The total amount of the award is $400,000 over two or three years, with the sponsoring institution providing matching funding, contributing to 50% of the total award.

PSI acknowledges that mid-career can be a challenging time for physician researchers. During this phase, there are often additional academic roles and responsibilities including committee work, leadership positions, and mentoring of junior investigators, while clinical work continues. PSI recognizes the importance in supporting this phase of an investigator’s trajectory.

Dr. Snider is well-positioned to leverage the dedicated time afforded by this fellowship, combining her early research discoveries and leadership expertise to advance her research and apply it effectively within the field of emergency medicine. This highlights the significance of mid-career salary support for physician-researchers in maintaining their research momentum and translating their findings into practical applications.

Fellowship Funds to be Used for Redefining the Role of Emergency Department Outreach Workers in Healthcare

Ontario’s emergency departments (EDs) often reveal the profound effects of social issues on health. Dr. Carolyn Snider, a leading emergency medicine physician and researcher, has dedicated her career to creating outreach programs that tackle these social determinants to enhance healthcare in Ontario. These programs, including new ED outreach initiatives for youth affected by violence and people experiencing homelessness (PEH), are showing promising signs of improving health outcomes and optimizing healthcare use.

Dr. Snider’s work emphasizes the necessity of redefining the role of outreach workers in healthcare from “nice-to-have” to essential, backed by careful evaluation and alignment with Ontario’s healthcare performance metrics. With homelessness rising in Ontario alongside increasing violence among youth, the burden on the healthcare system is intensifying. Dr. Snider’s follows the Knowledge-To-Action (KTA) framework to translate research into action.

Dr. Snider’s PSI fellowship aims to refine these outreach programs for Ontario, demonstrate their benefits, develop scalable models, and secure ongoing funding. Through this work, she strives to establish a healthcare environment where ED outreach workers are recognized as vital to delivering patient care and achieving sustainable health outcomes across Ontario.

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Dr. Venkatesh Thiruganasambandamorthy: 2024 PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation (KT) Fellowship Recipient

“Our research program plans to undertake knowledge translation of the Canadian Syncope Pathway at 16 hospitals across Canada, evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation strategies; develop and implement a prehospital syncope risk tool for diversion of very-low risk patients from the emergency department to alternate care pathways, and to develop and implement an artificial intelligence algorithm to semi-automate emergency department syncope care. By undertaking the above research and knowledge translation activities, our aim to improve the health of Ontarians by enhancing patient safety while reducing healthcare cost by improving effectiveness. Our studies will provide a template for developing and implementing practice recommendations/guidelines for common emergency conditions and incorporating technological advances such as artificial intelligence and remote monitoring of patients to improve the health of Ontarians.” – Dr. Venkatesh Thiruganasambandamoorthy

PSI Foundation is pleased to announce Dr. Venkatesh Thiruganasambandamoorthy as the recipient of the 2024 PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship.

About Dr. Venkatesh Thiruganasambandamoorthy

Dr. Venkatesh Thiruganasambandamoorthy is a Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa. He is also an Emergency Physician at The Ottawa Hospital and a Senior Scientist within the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI). To date, Dr. Thiruganasambandamoorthy has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and secured over $6 million in peer-reviewed research funding as principal investigator. Dr. Thiruganasambandamoorthy’s research program focuses on robust risk-stratification and health services delivery of emergency department syncope.

About the PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship

The PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship is intended to provide salary support for a mid-career physician researcher in Ontario, who has demonstrated the ability to successfully complete high impact knowledge translation research. The total amount of the award is $400,000 over two or three years, with the sponsoring institution providing matching funding, contributing to 50% of the total award.

PSI acknowledges that mid-career can be a challenging time for physician researchers. During this phase, there are often additional academic roles and responsibilities including committee work, leadership positions, and mentoring of junior investigators, while clinical work continues. PSI recognizes the importance in supporting this phase of an investigator’s trajectory.

Dr. Thiruganasambandamoorthy highlights the importance of salary support awards for physician researchers at the mid-career level.

“During the early career phase, several organizations including the researchers’ home institutions provide support to start a research program. Unfortunately, currently no support is available for mid-career physician researchers except from PSI. This support at the mid-career level is critical to translate all the research findings from the early career stage into day-to-day clinical practice. Support at the mid-career and senior career level will improve the health of the population (Ontarians), and prominence at global stage. More importantly, it will help the researcher lead system level changes to impact healthcare and train the next generation of researchers for delivering world class care to Ontarians and Canadians. ”

Fellowship Funds to be Used for Optimizing Management of Patients with Syncope

Dr. Thiruganasambandamoorthy’s research focuses on health systems improvement, specifically development and implementation of tools to reduce resource utilization through robust risk-stratification while improving patient safety. The focus is on the ‘Optimal Management of patients with syncope’.

Syncope (fainting) is a common with 160,000 patients visiting Canadian emergency departments (ED) annually. About 16,000 (10%) will have serious underlying problems (blood clots in the lung, bleeding) and/or will die within 30 days. One-third/half of these conditions will not be evident during the ED visit. Dr. Thiruganasambandamoorthy and his team developed a robust tool, the Canadian Syncope Risk Score (CSRS) and are embarking on its knowledge translation (KT, i.e. raising physicians’ awareness and facilitating its use). With input from stakeholders including KT experts and patients, they developed practice recommendations, the Canadian Syncope Pathway, identified barriers/facilitators for implementation, and through user-centered design workshops, they identified strategies and developed educational materials for implementation.

During the fellowship, Dr. Thiruganasambandamoorthy will complete a multi-centre trial to implement the Pathway and evaluate how evidence-based implementation strategies supported its uptake in practice. Additionally, two-thirds of patients with syncope arrive to the ED by ambulance. They plan to validate and implement a paramedic tool for identifying very-low-risk patients for diversion from the ED. Finally, the research team plans to develop and implement an artificial intelligence algorithm to semi-automate ED syncope care.

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PSI Virtual Office Hours with Samuel Moore

PSI Executive Director Samuel Moore will now be hosting virtual office hours for the general public through Zoom, occurring on select Tuesday mornings from 11:00 AM to 11:30 AM (Eastern Standard Time). Available meeting dates will be posted at the beginning of each month on the PSI Twitter account.

If you have any inquiries about our grants programs, application procedures, or general inquiries, feel free to use these virtual office hours as an opportunity to drop in for a one-on-one chat. These virtual office hours were created so that grantees, applicants, and reviewers with longer-form inquiries can have any outstanding questions answered.

To join the Zoom meeting room, click the hyperlink below or enter the meeting code below into your Zoom app.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84520912698
Zoom Meeting ID: 845 2091 2698

If assistance is needed, please see this guide from Zoom support with detailed instructions on how to join a Zoom meeting room, or email psif@psifoundation.org.

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New PSI Funding Opportunity: 2024 PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation (KT) Fellowship

PSI Launches the 2024 Competition for the PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship

PSI Foundation is very pleased to announce the 2024 competition for the PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship. This Fellowship is intended to provide salary support for a new investigator who has demonstrated the ability to successfully complete high impact knowledge translation research. The Fellowship funds, dedicated to salary support, must protect at least 50% of the Fellow’s time to conduct such research.

Please note: Knowledge translation must be the fundamental purpose of this Fellowship and must be demonstrated in the application.

Amount and Duration of Funding

This program offers two options for a funding timeline for salary support: A maximum of $150,000 per year for two years; OR a maximum of $100,000 per year for three years.

Please note: the award is intended to protect at least 50% of the fellow’s time to undertake research, regardless of whether the award is taken over two or three years.

Eligibility of Candidate

For the 2024 competition, PSI has set the eligibility criteria for candidates as follows:

The candidate for the Fellowship must be either:

  • Within six (6) years of their first academic appointment and have demonstrated potential for high impact research work
    • Please note: PSI has adjusted this eligibility requirement in recognition of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Dedicating at least 50% of a full-time schedule to the Fellowship
  • A practising physician with a College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) licensed M.D. having direct patient care responsibilities and an academic appointment, thus eligible to apply for their own research grants as an independent investigator.

OR

  • A clinical fellow in Ontario who is a practising physician having direct patient care responsibilities, with a supervisor who has an academic appointment and that can provide the necessary research supervision and infrastructure (including administering the grant at the sponsoring institution). A letter of support from this supervisor must be included in the application.

Important Information in Funding Guidelines

The Funding Guidelines contain important information regarding the award, including PSI’s definition of knowledge translation, sponsoring institution requirements, and funding criteria.

Please review this document before applying.

How to Apply

Similar to the previous years, PSI is launching the 2024 competition through a Letter of Intent (LOI) process. Please note that for this competition, applicants are required to submit their applications directly to PSI, not through the institution.

We require all applicants to submit the completed LOI directly to PSI via the PSI Online Grants Management System (https://psifoundation.smartsimple.ca/) by June 5th, 2023 at 5pm EST. LOIs will be reviewed by the PSI Grants Committee in July/August 2023.

PSI will invite successful applicants to submit full applications by November 6th, 2023 at 5pm EST, which will undergo internal review for a final funding decision in December 2023.

Questions?

Please contact the PSI Office to discuss any questions you may have about submitting an application for funding.

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New PSI Funding Opportunity: 2024 PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation (KT) Fellowship

PSI acknowledges that mid-career can be a challenging time for physician researchers. During this phase, there are often additional academic roles and responsibilities including committee work, leadership positions, and mentoring of junior investigators, while clinical work continues. PSI recognizes the importance in supporting this phase of an investigator’s trajectory.

PSI Launches the 2024 Competition for the PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship

PSI Foundation is very pleased to announce the 2024 competition for the PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship. This Fellowship is intended to provide salary support for a mid-career physician researcher in Ontario who has demonstrated the ability to successfully complete high-impact knowledge translation research. The Fellowship funds, dedicated to salary support, must protect at least 50% of the Fellow’s time to conduct such research.

Please note: Knowledge translation must be the fundamental purpose of this Fellowship and must be demonstrated in the application.

Amount and Duration of Funding

Total Support

This program offers two options for a funding timeline for salary support:

A maximum of $400,000 over two years;

OR

A maximum of $400,000 over three years.

The award is intended to protect at least 50% of the fellow’s time to undertake research, regardless of whether the award is taken over two or three years.

Matching Funding Requirements

The sponsoring institution is required to fund 50% of the total award.

For example, if the fellow requests a total support of $400,000 over two years, then PSI will fund $200,000 over two years ($100,000 per year) and the institution is required to co-fund $200,000 over two years ($100,000 per year).

Eligibility

For the 2024 competition, the candidate for the Fellowship must be:

  • A practicing physician in Ontario with a College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario licensed M.D. having direct patient care responsibilities and an academic appointment, thus eligible to apply for their own research grants as an independent investigator
  • Within six (6) to fifteen (15) years of their first academic appointment and have demonstrated potential for high impact research work
  • Dedicating at least 50% of a full-time schedule to the Fellowship

Important Information in Funding Guidelines

The Funding Guidelines contain important information regarding the award, including PSI’s definition of knowledge translation, matching funding requirements, and funding criteria.

Please review this document before applying.

How to Apply

PSI is launching the 2024 competition through a Letter of Intent (LOI) process. Please note that for this competition, applicants are required to submit their applications directly to PSI, not through their institution.

We require all applicants to submit the completed LOI directly to PSI via the PSI Online Grants Management System (https://psifoundation.smartsimple.ca/) by June 5th, 2023 at 5pm EST. LOIs will be reviewed by the PSI Grants Committee in July/August 2023.

PSI will invite successful applicants to submit full applications, which will undergo internal review for a final funding decision in December 2023.

Questions?

Please contact the PSI Office to discuss any questions you may have about submitting an application for funding.

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Dr. Selina Liu: Finding a New Approach to Improve Screening for Diabetic Eye Disease

“This was my first successful grant as a new investigator, so it really jumpstarted my research career.… Getting that first grant and being able to do this research led to other opportunities, and I’m very grateful to PSI Foundation for their support.” – Dr. Selina Liu, Western University, Lawson Health Research Institute and St. Joseph’s Health Care, London, Ontario

Recent estimates from Diabetes Canada indicate that 5.7 million Canadians are living with diabetes. Many of these people do or will experience eye damage, called diabetic retinopathy, which is a major cause of vision loss. As a result, practice guidelines recommend that people with diabetes undergo screening for diabetic retinopathy once a year.

People with diabetes have their eye exams covered through OHIP, but they may face other barriers to getting an exam, such as simply remembering to make the appointment, taking additional time off work for the exam, and taking eye drops that make it difficult to see and drive for some time after the exam.

“Prior research showed that about 50% of people with diabetes in Ontario weren’t having their eyes checked regularly, and that’s a major problem. We know that diabetic retinopathy is the main cause of blindness in working-age adults in Canada and has a drastic effect on quality of life,” says Dr. Selina Liu, Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine at Western University, Associate Scientist at Lawson Health Research Institute and Endocrinologist, Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism at St. Joseph’s Health Care London, Ontario. “Vision loss due to diabetic retinopathy is preventable through early detection and treatment. Developing strategies to improve retinopathy screening seemed to be a major area that deserved further research.”

One strategy uses a new technology to potentially make screening more accessible.

Non-mydriatic ultra-widefield (UWF) retinal imaging, which uses a specialized camera to take a wide-angle image of the retina, offers a few advantages over the usual screening methods used by optometrists. It only takes a few minutes and does not require eye drops, and images can be taken by trained staff and provided to an ophthalmologist to be read later. For these reasons, UWF imaging has potential to be incorporated into the regular diabetes clinic visits.

“What if we could integrate screening into a diabetes clinic visit?” says Dr. Liu. “If we could screen for retinopathy on the same day and in the same location where our patients are already coming for diabetes care, some of the barriers to getting screening done would be taken away.”

In 2016, Dr. Liu and a multidisciplinary team received funding from PSI Foundation for a randomized clinical trial called Clearsight to examine whether UWF imaging could detect more patients with eye disease that needed closer monitoring or treatment compared to usual screening.

“As a new investigator, embarking on a full 740-person randomized controlled trial was a bit daunting at first,” she says.  “But having funding from PSI Foundation was essential for this trial and gave me confidence as I went down this path.”

The research team recruited 740 patients with diabetes to participate in the trial, with half being screened through UWF imaging and half receiving usual care. The trial mimicked how screening is or could be done in a real-world setting: the patients enrolled in the UWF group were offered screening at the same clinic visit with the images read by an ophthalmologist later, while those receiving usual screening were responsible for making their own optometrist appointment. Patients in the UWF group were also still advised to visit their optometrist for usual screening, as per standard of care.

The team found that on-site screening significantly increased detection of diabetic eye disease that required either increased surveillance (more than annually) or referral to an ophthalmologist for further assessment. They also found that on-site screening resulted in significantly higher screening adherence than usual screening. The study did not look at patients’ vision outcomes as a result of the screening (since a much larger and longer trial would be required), but they expect that if more patients who require closer monitoring or ophthalmology referral are identified early, the rates of vision-threatening diabetic eye disease would ultimately decrease.

While the results were promising, screening with UWF imaging does come with significant costs, and Dr. Liu plans to complete a cost-effectiveness analysis of the imaging compared to usual screening. She is also undertaking research on other approaches to identify patients at risk of diabetic eye disease, including the use of artificial intelligence to read UWF images and the use of blood biomarkers for retinopathy screening.

Ultimately, she hopes that the Clearsight trial and other related work will provide evidence that can be incorporated into diabetes clinical practice guidelines to improve screening and vision care for people with diabetes, in Canada and worldwide.

“We hope that having this study will provide the high-quality evidence that this approach can improve retinopathy screening and detection rates, and perhaps it could be implemented in clinical practice guidelines so that the diabetes clinic could be a one-stop shop for diabetes care, including eyes,” says Dr. Liu. “We have more work to do to get there, but we hope our work can influence changes to health policy and clinical practice in how screening for diabetic eye disease in Canada is performed.”

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Dr. Brian Hummel: Bringing Forward Indigenous Voices to Improve Inuit Child Health

First Nations, Inuit and Métis people in Canada have poorer health outcomes than non-Indigenous people due to historical and ongoing systems of discrimination, and these disparities can start in childhood, with Inuit children experiencing higher rates of respiratory infections, iron deficiency anemia, and other conditions.

A team of researchers in Ottawa – home to the largest Inuit population in Canada outside of the traditional Inuit homeland of Inuit Nunangat – recently completed a study funded by the PSI Foundation that aims to arm caregivers of Inuit children with the knowledge they want and need to improve child health outcomes.

“Our colonial history, historical and ongoing systems of discrimination, and the unique challenges that Inuit people face when they have to move from the north to an urban Ottawa community result in a lot of cultural dissonance and tensions that are challenging for this community,” says Dr. Brian Hummel, currently a pediatric infectious disease fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO). “We wanted to better understand what those challenges are and what can be done to help support child health for this community.”

Recognizing the need for better knowledge sharing around child health, Dr. Hummel and co-investigator Dr. Daniel Bierstone, along with supervisor Dr. Radha Jetty, the physician lead for Inuit Child Health and the Nunavut Program at CHEO, partnered with the Inuuqatigiit Centre for Inuit Children, Youth and Families to better understand the experiences of caregivers of Inuit children related to child health.

Supported by a PSI Foundation Resident Research Grant, Dr. Hummel and the team conducted focus groups with 24 caregivers of Inuit children. In the focus groups, they discussed where caregivers go for child health knowledge, the topics they felt they needed more knowledge about, and how they prefer to learn about child health.

Dr. Hummel says that the qualitative approach to the study, as opposed to conducting a survey or other quantitative method, was essential to collecting data that would directly represent the voices of the caregivers.

“This approach allowed us to collect data that was more rich, raw and real, and it allowed Indigenous voices to be more directly represented in the research,” he says. “As non-Indigenous researchers, we viewed our role as being vessels to bring forward Indigenous insights, very much in the spirit of ‘never about us without us.’”

Knowledge-sharing programs should include both Indigenous and Western ways of knowing

In the focus groups, caregivers said they needed more support and information about parenting and development, adolescent mental and sexual health, common childhood illnesses, infant care and nutrition – topics where there can be tension between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing.

Caregivers also said that they often turned to their families, friends, community members and Indigenous health services for child health information, largely because of previous negative experiences with Western medical institutions and lack of trust of these institutions.

While caregivers strongly preferred in-person knowledge-sharing sessions for their supportive environment and opportunity to build community, importantly, they identified that involving both Inuit Elders and health care providers in these sessions was important.

“One of the interesting themes that came out in the focus groups was this idea of synergy between Indigenous ways of knowing and Western medicine ways of knowing, and how those two things don’t need to compete with each other but can instead work synergistically together to support Inuit child health,” says Dr. Hummel. “There are things that are valued more in the cultural understandings of health, such as nutrition, child-rearing and development. But there were also things they valued about western medicine approaches.”

“Ultimately knowledge-sharing programs should include both Inuit and Western knowledge and traditions, while empowering families to engage in Indigenous child-rearing practices,” he adds.

The study is the first of its kind to explore caregivers’ perspectives on urban Inuit child health knowledge, and it has been presented at national pediatric and Indigenous health conferences and published in the peer-reviewed journal International Journal of Circumpolar Health. Dr. Hummel and the research team hope that these findings can now be used to help develop programs and other knowledge-sharing initiatives to benefit caregivers and ultimately improve Inuit children’s health.

As Dr. Hummel finishes his fellowship and moves to the next stage of his career, he plans to continue being involved in research and education on top of his clinical practice. And he says the PSI Resident Research Award has helped prepare him by giving him a rare opportunity to lead a larger project.

“As residents, there aren’t a lot of funding opportunities for these kinds of larger projects,” he says. “PSI funding is really important for those of us who want to do larger projects to have these opportunities.”

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PSI Visiting Scholars Program Open for Applications

The PSI Visiting Scholars Program is now open to all eligible medical universities, hospitals, and research institutes in Ontario.

PSI’s Visiting Scholar Program aims to support specific priorities identified by a given hospital/research institute in Ontario and PSI’s Grants Committee. This program provides funds ($15,000 per year) for a hospital/research institute in Ontario to attract an external expert to address such priorities.

For more information, email psif@psifoundation.org or check out the brochure for the PSI Visiting Scholar Program.

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