Team Building Awards

Team 2021-22 Team Award Recipients

Developing a Community of Practise to improve the health and wellbeing of children in rural, remote, northern and Indigenous communities in BC - Dr. Gislason, SFU and team

The purpose of this project is to invite both existing and new collaborators to come together to explore how best to build relationships and work together to improve the health and wellbeing of children in rural, remote, northern and Indigenous communities in BC. To guide this work, we will investigate how to best cooperate in order to achieve the following four goals: (1)To create a group of researchers, clinicians, allied health professionals, community members and youth interested in advocating for increased support for children in rural communities in BC whose mental health has and/or is being impacted by the climate crisis; (2) To produce grants and manuscripts which will advance knowledge in this field, especially given the mental health urgency of children during the COVID-19 pandemic; (3) To work on developing a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of the theoretical, policy, practice, and action dimensions of this problem and a framework for working on these issues; and (4) To increase the interest of trainees in this field of research and to support the development of Early Career Individuals

Team 2020-21 Team Award Recipients

Developing an interprofessional health sector research team to advance the engagement of vulnerable women in prenatal care in northern BC - Dr. Sanders & Dr. Irving, UNBC. 

The purpose of this project is to build a new interdisciplinary research team. The goal of this team is to integrate knowledge, methods, and agency from different disciplines, using a synthesis of approaches to examine prenatal care for vulnerable women in northern rural settings. We plan to recruit 10-12 key providers involved in care delivery: health care providers (i.e. nurse practitioners from family services), social worker, Indigenous elder, non-for-profit provider (i.e. harmony house) and convene a series of online webinars/workshop meetings to discuss strategies for clinical involvement and commitment. A key output from this team will be laying the foundations for robust research setting priority work, with a focus on primary care. One avenue we wish to explore is working in collaboration with the James Lind Alliance (JLA) approach thereby extending partnership working to include patient partners. Since the JLA method is designed to raise awareness of gaps that have direct relevance to patient care, we believe a clear priority setting will support future grant applications. While we have experienced a slightly slower start than hoped for due to the changes linked to COVID at the end of 2020 and into 2021 with key staff being redeployed to manage immunizations and contact tracing we can report out on the following activities.

Team 2019-20 Team Award Recipients

Healthy Beginnings: Closing the gap for a brighter Nisga’a future - Martin Guhn & Liza Hadone

With funding from the RHSRNbc Team Award, this past year has been highly productive in terms of team-building between the Toddler Development Instrument (TDI) Research Team at UBC and Lisims Early Learning Partnership (LELP) team in Nisga’a. Over this time, project partners have held over 15 phone call meetings. These meeting times developed a mutual deeper understanding of the context, work and expertise each partner brings to the team. These meetings also were fundamental to co-developing a proposal for UBC’s Community-University Engagement Fund (CUES). We are thrilled to announce we were successful in this application and have been granted funding (January 2020 – August 2021) to continue and build on our partnership. In addition, RHSRNbc Team funding provided our team with the capacity to apply for a Partnership Engage Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council (SSHRC). We are pleased to report we were successful in this competition, providing the partnership additional funding for the next year (April 2020 - March 2021).

Researching the Health Effects of Fracking in Northeast British Columbia – Dr. Meyer, Dr. Caron-Beaudoin and team

The RHSRNbc team building award was used to bring together academic and community-based researchers from a number of disciplines who are currently engaged in research on unconventional gas development (UNGD) and human health. This led to organized site visits, teleconference meetings with doctors and researchers studying this issue in the North. The award was also used to form a stakeholder research advisory group and, to write a grant proposal for a primary study on fracking exposure in Northeastern BC and human health outcomes to be submitted to CIHR in the spring of 2020.

Developing an interprofessional health sector research team to advance physical activity in northern BC – Dr. Pelletier, Dr. Pousette and team.

The purpose of this project is to build a new multidisciplinary research team. The goal of this the team will be to support the promotion of physical activity for the primary and secondary prevention of chronic disease in the context of interprofessional healthcare teams in northern BC. We plan to recruit 10-15 health care providers and convene a meeting to discuss strategies for clinician involvement on our research team, to create a set of research priorities related to physical activity and health care settings in northern BC, and to identify which tools may be helpful for team members to introduce physical activity into their context to improve health services. Healthcare contexts will include perspectives of physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social care workers, nurses and nurse practitioners, family and specialist physicians, and clinical kinesiologists. We aim to include expertise and experience from a broad range of northern stakeholders including practicing clinicians, clinical faculty at UNBC and UBC Faculty of Medicine, representations from the Divisions of Family Practice in the Northern Health Region, the Northern Health Primary Care Network, Northern Health Population and Public Health, First Nations Health Authority, Carrier Sekani Family Services, and the Northern Health Indigenous Health Program. We will also recruit an Indigenous co-lead to assist with the planning of team activities in order to ensure that intentional and specific inclusion of Indigenous knowledge is a key component of future work.

Team 2018-19 Team Award Recipients

Measuring Impact of a Healthcare Travelling Roadshow - Hanlon & Maurice

On 9 November 2018, a Rural Health Services Research Network of BC funded team meeting brought together researchers and key stakeholders to discuss measuring the long-term impact of the Healthcare Travelling Roadshow (HCTRS). The aims of the meeting were (1) to discuss the potential for collaborative research on the long-term impact of the HCTRS, and (2) to formulate a work plan for a grant application to support further study on the impact of the HCTRS. This team meeting concluded that: 1) the Roadshow is an excellent and complex intervention that warrants study; 2) long term study is difficult – surrogate markers of success are necessary; 3) there is a relative paucity of related literature, creating both a challenge and an opportunity; 4) we should move towards developing a Design-Based Research (DBR) Research Proposal in collaboration with colleagues from UBC’s Centre for Health Education Scholarship (CHES) as a means of developing and modifying our theoretical approach to an intervention which is ongoing, and 5) pilot research should gather baseline data to inform and support the subsequent study. Following the meeting, co-investigators were recruited from the Island Medical Program and Interior Medical Program, and an application was submitted to the CHES Distributed Medical Education competition to help fund further baseline data gathering. The application was successful, and we will be conducting a survey of youth in rural settings across the province in 2019/20.