Imagine not recognizing the face of a person you see every day, or even the face of someone you’ve known all your life, like a parent or sibling. Such is the reality for people with prosopagnosia – a selective visual problem caused by damage to the very specific brain circuitry responsible for taking the visual image of a face and recognizing it. Some individuals with prosopagnosia acquired the condition, e.g. due to brain injury or trauma, while others are born with it.
The development process behind a new app to help sedentary people get moving shows how unique partnerships between researchers, consumers, and patient groups can lead to innovative health research. Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) scientists Dr. Linda Li and Dr.
Staff at Richmond Hospital’s Diabetes Education Centre realized they needed to rethink the healthy eating and nutrition program offered through the centre when they kept getting the same feedback from their diabetes patients: “I don’t eat half of the foods you just talked about.” Their patients’ honest response makes sense – most of them are of Chinese ethnicity, which reflects Richmond’s predominantly Chinese population. In Canada, people of Asian, Aboriginal, South Asian, Hispanic, and African descent are at greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes1.
Canada’s doctors face a challenging task: help shift healthcare and health research to being more patient-oriented and do so with high levels of efficiency that safeguard the current healthcare system in which resources are already stretched. Effective knowledge translation (KT) – turning research knowledge and innovation into new strategies, action, devices, etc., that improve patient care and healthcare systems – provides the evidence needed by healthcare professionals and policy-makers to determine how to meet the challenge of delivering the best care in a cost-effective manner.
Call it the Dr. Google effect. Thanks to today’s search engines, seemingly boundless internet, and social media, people who are not medical professionals are better equipped than ever to investigate the symptoms, illnesses, and conditions that ail them. According to Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Samantha Pollard, such availability and accessing of health-related information are partly why health care is becoming more patient-centred and shared decision-making (SDM) between patients and physicians is increasingly being supported by public health policy.
High quality health research evidence brings maximum value only when it is put into practice. Knowledge translation interventions involving researchers, clinicians, policy makers, and patients are needed to see positive health outcomes. In order to facilitate knowledge translation around women’s heart health, the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) hosted a public event, Your Heart Your Health, on May 12.
In the process of researching public opinion about gene therapy, a medical procedure aimed at delivering new genetic material into a person to prevent or treat a disease, Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Dr. Julie Robillard unexpectedly found that beyond personal risk concerns, people were most troubled by the lack of information around the experimental treatment.
