During their residencies at St. Paul’s Hospital in Downtown Vancouver, Dr. Erin Cusack and Dr. Rannie Tao were completing long-term electives at Vancouver Coastal Health’s Three Bridges Community Health Centre when they both noticed that many of their patients were suffering from chronic pain conditions and feeling that their needs were not being met by the health care system. What was striking to both of them was the sense of hopelessness among those patients.

Although it’s not the proverbial 10-mile hike in the snow uphill (both ways), getting to school as part of living in an urban environment gets teens more physically active than traveling to and from school in a suburban setting, according to a study out of the Centre for Hip Health and Mobility (CHHM), a Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute centre. 

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. 

Maple Ridge resident Rina Varley distinctly remembers the powerful feeling of relief that washed over her after talking to a psychiatric genetic counsellor from the Psychiatric Genetic Counselling Clinic about her generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) for the first time.

“I’d always wondered if trauma that I’d experienced earlier in my life had caused my GAD. Emily (the psychiatric genetic counsellor) let me know that while trauma can exacerbate GAD, it certainly doesn’t cause mental illness,” says Varley.