UVic forms palliative care research teams

by Maria Lironi

UVic professors are leading two Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) projects designed to boost research on palliative care.

The New Emerging Team (NET) grant provides five years of support for the creation or development of teams of in-dependent investigators doing collaborative multidisciplinary research in Canadian research institutions. By providing these NET grants, CIHR hopes to build capacity to do research in palliative care, to build new research teams, and to give researchers a building block for applying for research funding in the future.

Drs. Francis Lau (health information science) and Peter Kirk, research director of the Vancouver Island Health Authority, will use their $1.097-million NET grant to co-ordinate studies on improving communication between care providers, patients and families.

The six team investigators include Drs. Mary Ellen Purkis (nursing) and Pat MacKenzie (social work). The five collab-orators on the team include Drs. Denise Cloutier-Fisher (centre on aging/geography) and Janet Bavelas (psychology).

"Do patients tell their physicians the same message that they share with nurses or counsellors?" Lau wonders. "Do different care providers communicate in a way that enables meaningful sharing? We need to learn how to com-municate with our patients and give them sufficient information about their prognosis and alternatives so that they can make informed decisions."

Dr. Kelli Stajduhar (nursing/centre on aging) will co-lead a six-person team of researchers from across Canada with Dr. Robin Cohen, research director and assistant professor of palliative care at McGill University. The team, which includes Dr. Neena Chappell (sociology/centre on aging), will use its $1.36-million NET grant to examine the problems faced by family caregivers.

"We know that care-giving can be very burdensome for some families," explains Stajduhar. "Our goal is to enable family members to provide care if they wish to do so without endangering their health. There are financial, social, psychological and physical problems that are the result of care-giving—we want to lessen the health risk and also inform policies, provide support and train people to become researchers in the field."

The funding for 33 CIHR projects across Canada was an-nounced recently by Tony Ianno, Minister of State for Families, at the 15th International Congress on Care of the Terminally Ill, held in Montreal.