Researchers Celebrate SHRF Establishment Grants
The Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation (SHRF) Establishment Grant Program helps researchers establish a health research program in Saskatchewan. The goal of the Establishment grant is to provide support for researchers to achieve the productivity needed to obtain longer-term, more substantial funding and continue working towards better health for Saskatchewan residents and beyond. Please join the College of Nursing in congratulating Drs. Tracie Risling and Donna Rennie on their 2017 - 2018 SHRF Establishment Grants for the following projects.
Dr. Tracie Risling
Investing in Future Healthcare Solutions: Collaborating with Saskatchewan Patients to Measure Empowerment and Improve eHealth Engagement
Providing patients access to their health information is essential to promoting increased involvement in care and advancing health care delivery. When patients are empowered, they are more likely to engage, commit to healthy behaviours and be more active in shared decision-making. Research suggests supporting patient empowerment through access to health information can improve outcomes and lower health care costs.
“Electronic patient portals allow patients to access their health care data stored in their electronic health record,” said Risling. “In this research, we will work with Saskatchewan patients to create a new measure of patient empowerment in digital health. After testing the measure, we will use it to examine how the implementation of the eHealth Saskatchewan Citizen Health Portal is influencing empowerment for patients in the province. This research advancing the measurement of patient empowerment is a needed support for the advancement of patient and family-centred intervention in Saskatchewan and beyond.”
Dr. Risling’s research team includes Dr. Laurie Hellsten (College of Education), Dr. Donna Goodridge (College of Medicine) and Mr. John Moss (Patient Representative).
Dr. Donna Rennie
Asthma Diagnosis and Severity among Children in Saskatchewan
Looking at how asthma develops from early childhood into adolescence is what postdoctoral fellow Dr. Oluwafemi Oluwole and Lead Supervisor Dr. Donna Rennie will be examining. Asthma is not a single disease, but one that takes on many different forms depending on the age of onset. Not all children who have asthma during preschool years continue to experience the disease as youth, but the factors that cause children to either outgrow or continue to experience asthma are not known.
In order for Drs. Oluwole and Rennie to look at the progression of asthma in children, they are going to look at changes in diagnosed asthma, associations between baseline factors and connections between baseline management strategies and symptom severity and lung function.