News

By Kim Barnhardt

Hot off the heels of a very successful first-ever research and innovation day, Dr. Sharon Johnston is energized. The event, hosted by OSSU’s COFFRE initiative (Communautés Ontariennes Francophones Facilitant la Recherche Équitable) at Montfort Hospital and sponsored by the Brain Heart Interconnectome research program, attracted about 100 researchers, students and patient partners earlier this spring. The stand out element? A student poster competition in which they used elevator pitches to summarize their research for 5 patient judges.

“It was amazing – the patient partners said they loved it and want to do more of it and really enjoyed meeting the researchers and the students,” said Dr. Johnston. “The students also liked it, having the opportunity to explain their research to people outside the lab, and their excitement about it.”

Perla Nahban, an MD Candidate at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, won for her presentation, Dépression post-partum chez les femmes immigrantes noires et francophones en Ontario, une étude qualitative.

With a view to fall grant submissions to Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), immediate focus is to expand the patient engagement consultation service for researchers.

“We’re really encouraging teams with fall CIHR grant submissions to reach out to us to set up consultations with francophone patients to seek feedback on their research questions, outcomes, methodology etc. The service is available through COFFRE and research teams can get direct input from patients – it’s a way to engage patients early on so that researchers can include in their grants that their question was informed by patients.”

As patient engagement in research is important to CIHR and so many others, this forward-thinking service offers great value to researchers, and will further COFFRE’s efforts to build Francophone patient engagement into research in the province.

Find out about COFFRE’s consultation service.