Our Researchers’ Cafés are informal gatherings of researchers, clinicians, decision-makers and patient partners.
Research teams will present their work and there will be time for networking in-between sessions. The topic for this upcoming Café is Partnership in Research. We have five amazing presentations on how research teams have partnered with patients and community partners have made an impact in health care in the areas of long-term care, older adults, South Asian community members, and clinical trials.
This year’s Café is in-person only at Central City Offices in Surrey. Register on Eventbrite.
Session overviews
Research Priority Setting: A Partnered Journey not a Destination
The Fraser Health long-term care and assisted living research partners group, comprised of residents, family partners, volunteers and staff, has played a key role in co-creating a process for ongoing research priority setting in the sector.
This process aims to determine community-driven priorities and the most impactful research opportunities. This presentation explores the co-creation and application of the research priority setting process. We also discuss our experiences with partnerships to address community-driven research priorities through timely patient-oriented research and knowledge mobilization.
Bios
Dr. Janice Sorensen is leader for clinical research in long-erm care and assisted living at Fraser Health Authority. She provides leadership in the management of capacity-building, collaboration, support and execution of research grounded in integrated knowledge mobilization across the sector in the region. Dr. Sorensen plays an active role in the strategic development of new partnerships for patient-oriented, including forming and supporting the Long-Term Care and Assisted Living Research Partners Group since 2021.
Karim Chagani currently works at Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion (BACI) as a POD facilitator at Seniors Space. His work primarily focuses on designing, delivering and evaluating the support to older adults. He brings over ten years of experience as a volunteer providing social and individual services to residents at a long-term care facility and assisted living. He is a volunteer partner member in the Long-Term Care and Assisted Living Research Partner’s Group. He has been involved in the group since its inception in 2021 and supported several research projects as well as the recruitment of additional members.
Qualitatively exploring the rapid roll-out of telehealth in Fraser Health’s long-term care homes
A number of measures to protect the health of residents and staff in long-term care homes were implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. One was to restrict visitation, including by physicians who provide essential care to residents.
This necessitated the rapid roll-out of telehealth as a virtual care option to support physicians’ visits with residents during this period. This rapid roll-out has provided Fraser Health with the opportunity to explore continued use of telehealth in long-term care homes. Our team has been qualitatively examining care providers’ and recipients’ experiences of this rapid roll-out to identify lessons about ways to offer telehealth more accessibly and equitably across long-term care, several of which will be shared in this presentation.
Bio
Dr. Valorie Crooks is a health services researcher and professor at Simon Fraser University where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Service Geographies. She is also SFU’s Associate Vice-President, Research. Following her embedded placement as the inaugural Fraser Health Faculty Fellow (2021-22), much of her recent patient-partnered research has explored long-term care and assisted living contexts in this region. This has included studies focused on vaccine uptake among long-term care home staff during the pandemic, the rapid shift to virtual physician care and virtual family visitation during the pandemic, preparing the long-term care sector for growing numbers of HIV+ residents, and supporting older women’s sexual health in assisted living apartments.
Rahi: Lessons from Panjabi centered design of a culturally resonant intervention to support South Asian men who use substances
In this presentation, we describe Rahi, a research program that focuses on developing tailored and culturally resonant recovery programming for Panjabi men who use substances and their families. Rahi means ‘companion on a journey’ in Panjabi. We will begin by describing how an anti-racist and anti-oppressive praxis was used to inform a team structure that shares power between researchers, research users, and people with lived and living experience (PWLLE). Next, we will describe the Panjabi Centered Design process that was used to co-design the recovery program tailored specifically for Panjabi men. We will highlight the unique challenges of transgressing cultural, linguistic, health and structural barriers that existed between members of the research team. Finally, we will describe the components of the program and share the evidence that underpins its design.
Bio
Dr. Nitasha Puri is a clinical associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, as well medical lead at the Roshni Clinic in the department of addiction medicine and substance use services at Fraser Health. Her research interests include substance use among racialized populations, healing and recovery, and health equity. Originally trained in family medicine, she completed the clinical and research fellowships at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use, and is currently involved in teaching, clinical research and clinical service provision.
Engaging care receivers for early detection and management of frailty in older adults
Bio
Dr. Xiaowei Song is a Senior Clinical Scientist with the Fraser Health Authority (FHA) and an adjunct professor with the Simon Fraser University (SFU) Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology (BPK). Dr. Song is the principal investigator for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) on validating the electronic Frailty Index with the electronic Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (eFI-CGA) for clinical translations. She serves as the Scientific Lead of the Community Actions and Resources Empower Seniors (CARES) initiative and the founding Head of the SFU ImageTech Lab MRI Program.
Dr. Song has a long-standing interest in promoting brain health and general health in aging, with expertise and background in multidisciplinary fields combining neuroscience, neuroimaging, computer science, medical informatics and geriatric medicine research. Her research interest has focused on early identification and management of frailty, cognitive decline, neurodegeneration and their outcomes and risk and protective factors. Targeting improving patient care through health science and technology innovations, Dr. Song has engaged in developing and validating standardized assessment methods and software tools brain health and frailty for point-of-care utilizations. Dr. Song has been awarded multi-million dollars of research grants from prestigious funding agencies. She has contributed to the research advancement of the brain health and frailty in aging field with over 200 peer-reviewed publications.
Before relocating to Vancouver in late 2014, Dr. Song has spent nearly 18 years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, conducting frailty and brain health research at Dalhousie University Department of Medicine and Capital Health (Geriatrics) and the Neuroimaging Research Laboratory of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) Institute for Biodiagnostics (Atlantic).
The CLiCK trial: A double blind, cluster randomized, cross over trial evaluating 4% EDTA to reduce central line complications
Bio
Dr. Steve Reynolds is an ICU physician at the Royal Columbian Hospital who has held various leadership positions including site medical director and regional department of critical care. His focus is on translational research and he has successful research projects that range from pre-clinical physiology to large multi-center trials. He enjoys researching interventions that may be “positively disruptive” to the present standard of care. His most recent project is on the use of a novel central venous catheter-based transvascular phrenic nerve stimulator to provide negative pressure ventilation to critically ill patients. He is a co-inventor of this device, was the first to use it in humans, and has led much of the pre-clinical work that it is based on. He holds the TB Vets Professorship in Critical Care at Simon Fraser University and has been funded by CIHR, BC Lung, MITACS, Royal Columbian Hospital Foundation, CANHEALTH and the Hecht Foundation. He is a previous Peter Wall Scholar. He has an interest in biotech, holds various patents and serves as the chief medical officer or the lead scientific advisor for various start-up companies.