IHSPR Newsletter - September 2012

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Message from Dr. Robyn Tamblyn, IHSPR Scientific Director

Welcome to the September edition of the IHSPR Innovator. Welcome to the September edition of the IHSPR Innovator. This month I want to comment on some of the upcoming changes to the CIHR Open Suite of Programs and peer-review process and highlight the good news this means for our Health Services and Policy Research (HSPR) community.

The CIHR Open Suite reform consists of two broad schemes: the Foundation/Programmatic Research Scheme and the Project Scheme. While many in our HSPR community are familiar with the Project Scheme, the Programmatic Research Scheme offers an opportunity to overcome some of the funding challenges common to HSPR.

Programmatic Research involves connected sequences of conceptually related research projects that address gaps in current knowledge in the field, especially gaps of importance to improve policies, systems and health service programs. The expected duration of a programmatic grant is five to seven years. 

Programmatic grants will provide researchers in our community with the opportunity and flexibility to pursue novel, innovative and/or emergent avenues of health research, to engage in meaningful development of partnerships that enable knowledge translation and successful implementation and to reduce applicant burden through a less frequent requirement for grant application. Programmatic grants will be especially useful in addressing funding challenges associated with project-by-project funding, including discontinuities in staffing, longer lag-times between studies and difficulty in fostering knowledge translation and sustaining important researcher-decision-maker relationships.

However there are challenges. Our community has not had a history of writing or reviewing programmatic grants. Indeed, the mean duration of health services and policy grants is the shortest of all communities (figure 1) and renewal of previously funded grants to pursue a programmatic approach to research is rare (figure 2).

Figure 1

Long Description: Figure 1 - Grant Duration

Figure 2

Long Description: Figure 2 - Grant Renewals

Moving forward, IHSPR and the Institute for Population and Public Health (IPPH) will be working together to set the stage for success in our research communities in the new Programmatic Research Scheme. Through the establishment of criteria for excellence in programmatic research, we will equip our communities with the grant writing skills needed to be successful in upcoming funding opportunities. We will equally work together to develop principles of high quality peer review for our Programmatic Research grant review panels. We are now creating a work plan for moving forward on these activities, and will disseminate more information about this collaborative work in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Chair Showcase: Dr. Chaim Bell

Canadian Patient Safety Institute and CIHR Health Services and Policy Research Chair

When Dr. Chaim Bell was awarded the CIHR-CPSI Chair in Patient Safety and Continuity of Care, his goal was to build a comprehensive research program that would encompass several aspects of his current research interests. Since it was awarded to Dr. Bell in 2008, the Chair has enabled him to achieve this goal and other important successes as a result of increased interaction with stake-holders, the ability to take on new trainees and increased resources to establish a quality improvement program associated with this honour.

One of the Chair projects that has allowed Dr. Bell to leverage his own work has been the establishment of a Canadian site of the Veterans Association (VA) Quality Scholars Program in the United States, which provides clinicians with a post-residency fellowship in the improvement of health care. This collaboration has allowed Dr. Bell to expand his network to include clinical organizations as well as post-graduate, graduate and undergraduate students performing research on continuity of care and research and quality improvement.

Dr. Bell believes that quality of care, patient satisfaction and affordable care should be Canada’s highest priorities in Health Services and Policy Research. In addition to his work with students, Dr. Bell is involved in a number of other exciting projects in his capacity of Chair in Patient Safety and Continuity of Care. Some of these projects include:

  • developing indicators at the provincial and national levels for examining transitions in care;
  • producing research on medication reconciliation in support of CPSI’s ‘Safer Healthcare Now’ program; and
  • working with Accreditation Canada to develop high-caliber knowledge translation activities surrounding medication reconciliation strategies.

Of all of his accomplishments as the CIHR-CPSI Chair in Patient Safety and Continuity of Care, Dr. Bell feels that the largest contribution he has made to health services and policy research in Canada is his recent paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “Association of ICU or Hospital Admission with Unintentional Discontinuation of Medications for Chronic Diseases”. Published in 2011, Dr. Bell won the IHSPR Article of the Year award for this outstanding work. In July 2012 Dr. Bell moved to the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto working as both a clinician and a scientist.

Dr. Bell happily offered us some tips for young aspiring Health Services and Policy researchers and students:

  1. Don’t underestimate the importance of proper  and rigorous training.
  2. Choose your supervisors as though he or she is a spouse. Ensure that they are willing to help you or to be a mentor beyond your formal contact with them for graduate studies. As well, ensure that the two of you will gel in a way that leads to a productive collaboration.
  3. Finish, finish, finish. The importance for research success and productivity is to not  only finish your project to completion and publication, but also in what happens afterwards.
  4. Think broadly in terms of the health care system.

Did you know?
Dr. Bell was on a game show when he was 18 years old. The show was a Canadian game called Bumper Stumpers, wherein contestants had to guess personalized license plates. And Dr. Bell WON!!!

Sustainable Funding:
Keeping health services researchers afloat

To develop sustained research capacity in Health Services Research, researchers must succeed in maintaining funding for their research programs. A recent study by Karunananthan, Huyer, Ruest, Shi, and Tamblyn presented the determinants of funding success and the determinants of maintaining sustained funding. Results to date indicate that:

  • A critical mass of applicants, teams of investigators, resubmissions and application to strategic competitions are factors associated with funding success for all pillars.
  • Sustained funding is less likely for baseline applications submitted by HSPR pillar researchers and to applicants who restrict their applications to strategic competitions.
  • The culture of resubmission may require restructuring our peer review.
  • Sources of gender bias may need to be further investigated.

Gender Differences in Funding Success:

Adjusted odds ratios for funding success in males compared to females by age

Long Description: Gender Differences in Funding Success

Interested in Guideline Implementability Tools?
Please take this survey!

The Guideline Implementability Research and Application Network is a collaboration of international guideline developers, implementers, and researchers that are working to identify and describe existing implementability tools, and develop and evaluate new tools. This refers to information that helps health professionals understand how to plan for, accommodate, implement, and evaluate use of guidelines.

Please help us to define and identify additional implementability tools by completing a brief survey.

Funding Opportunities

Partnerships for Health Systems Improvement (2012-2013)

Deadline for Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRSQ) or the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux du Québec (MSSS) has passed.

Application deadline with partners: September 17, 2012
Competition deadline: November 1, 2012

Partnerships for Health System Improvement (PHSI) aims to strengthen Canada’s healthcare system through collaborative, applied and policy-relevant research. PHSI funds teams of decision makers and researchers to conduct applied health services and policy research.

View the full funding opportunity.

e-Health Innovations: Supporting More Efficient Population and Person-Centered Healthcare

Application deadline: October 16, 2012

The e-Health Innovations funding opportunity will support Canadian investigators to conduct research that will improve processes and/or outcomes related to efficiency and access in the following relevant research areas:

  • Patient-e-Heath
  • New Generation Health Professional
  • Timely Detection and Intervention

Team Grant : Health Challenges in Chronic Inflammation Initiative (Roadmap Signature Initiative: Inflammation in Chronic Disease - Health Challenges in Chronic Inflammation Initiative)

Application deadline: November 15, 2012

The overall objective of the Health Challenges in Chronic Inflammation initiative team grant is to support health research through the discovery and validation of common biomarkers, therapeutic targets, and universal inflammatory mechanisms across chronic diseases, with the ultimate goal to prevent, monitor and /or treat chronic disease by reducing inflammation. The relevant research areas include:

  • Molecular mechanisms underlying inflammation;
  • Inflammation prevention, monitoring, modulation and intervention across chronic diseases; and
  • Health services and population health research into inflammation in chronic disease

Harkness/ CHSRF Fellowships in Health Care Policy and Practice

Application deadline: November 19, 2012

The Harkness Fellowship award enables talented Canadians to participate in the Harkness Fellowships in Health Care Policy and Practice. This is a unique opportunity for mid-career professions to spend 12 months in the United States to conduct patient-oriented research study with leading U.S. health experts.

Congratulations!

The Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and Nursing Health Services Research Unit (NHSRU), University of Toronto site, is pleased to announce that Dr. Lianne Jeffs will be join­ing the unit, as Associate Director. She holds an Early Nursing Career Award with the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (2009-2012). In May 2010, Dr. Jeffs was awarded a CIHR Rising Star award in recognition of her ability to focus on important issues for nursing and health services research and for her commitment to capacity building in research and knowledge translation.

Dr. Jeffs will take over this role from Dr. Sean Clarke, who has served as Deputy Director of the NHSRU since 2010. This sum­mer, he became the inaugural holder of the Susan E. French Chair in Nursing Research and Innovative Practice at the McGill University School of Nursing and Director of the McGill Nursing Collaborative for Education and Innovation in Patient and Family Centred Care at the School of Nursing and the McGill-affiliated teaching hospitals.

Upcoming Events

IT Healthcare Canada Conference and Exhibition. Toronto, ON. October 2-4, 2012.

Society for Medical Decision Making 2012 Annual Meeting. Pheonix, USA. October 17-20, 2012.

International Forum on Health Care and Information Communication Technology (HICT). Halifax, NS. Octo­ber 19-21, 2012.

The Canadian Conference on Global Health. Ottawa, ON. October 21-23, 2012.

Advancing Excellence in Gender, Sex and Health Research. Montreal, QC. October 29-31, 2012.

Second Global Symposium on Health Systems Research. Beijing, China. October 31 - November 3, 2012.

The 8th Annual World Healthcare Innovation & Technology Congress. Arlington, USA. November 7-9, 2012.

Quiz

This month’s quiz is based on our IAB Member Krista Connell who works at the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation

  1. Who did Krista Connell create NAPHRO with?
    1. Robyn Tamblyn
    2. Aubrey J. Tingle
    3. Ashley MacIssac
    4. Daniel Rainham
  2. How many people have held the at NAPHRO twice, as Krista Connell has?
    1. 4
    2. 8
    3. 0
    4. 1
  3. Krista, along with Dr. Alan Bernstein cut NSHRF’S and CIHR’s birthday cake of how many years?
    1. 5
    2. 13
    3. 3
    4. 8

Please send your answers back to info.ihspr@mcgill.ca for a chance have your name entered into this month’s raffle to win cool prizes - if you have all three answers correct!

We would like to hear from you!
CIHR - Institute of Health Services and Policy Research
3666 McTavish, Second Floor, Montréal, QC, H3A 1Y2
Tel: 514-398-5736
Email: info.ihspr@mcgill.ca

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