Although family physicians (FPs) and home health staff (HHS) understand the value of coordinating care to improve the health of their shared patients, they continue to face major obstacles such as difficulty achieving timely communication to clarify medical orders, and limited opportunities to develop common care plans for patients with complex needs.
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.
Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile, is a bacteria that can cause infection when the balance of normal bacteria in the digestive system is upset. Approximately 5% of the population may carry C. difficile without any health problems1. But for others, carrying it can damage the bowel, lead to diarrhea and dehydration, and in extreme cases cause life-threatening complications.
Stroke researcher Dr. Lara Boyd has never worked with children before but a unique curriculum at Eaton Arrowsmith School has inspired the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist to investigate if and how the adolescent brain changes in response to a mental physiotherapy-like regimen of daily, repeated, cognitive exercises. With this project, Dr. Boyd becomes one of the first scientists to research the concept of building up brain matter for education purposes, to improve learning response among children with learning disabilities.
For more than 30 years, Dr. John Fleetham has been investigating sleep – or lack thereof due to snoring and sleep apnea. Dr. Fleetham is a respirologist and medical director of the Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) Sleep Disorder Program. His specific research area of interest is obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and over the past three decades he has led a research program investigating its causes, prevalence, consequences, diagnosis, and treatments.
