Excellence in Research

Palliative care focuses on supporting the needs of patients and families to improve quality of life when faced with a progressive, life-limiting illness, such as cancer. This care may include providing relief from pain and other symptoms that can be part of cancer or cancer treatment, as well as helping patients and families cope with the illness and make decisions about their care in a way that best reflects their values and priorities.

The study will consider patients who have died of gynecologic cancers in the province of Ontario to determine whether some patients were more likely than others to receive early palliative care, and if those who did had better experiences of living with, and dying of, cancer. The results of this research will help to inform when and how to best provide palliative care to patients, and improve end-of-life cancer care for patients and their families.

Severe maternal morbidity refers to a set of unexpected, pregnancy-associated maternal complications resulting in severe illness, prolonged hospitalization, long-term disability, or death. An estimated 16 in every 1,000 women in Canada experience severe maternal morbidity, and this rate has increased substantially over the last decade.This project will use an innovative linkage of high-quality, population-based data sets, including over 860,000 pregnancies to provide the first comparisons of severe maternal morbidity by race in Canada. It will profile the incidence and drivers of severe maternal morbidity over time in racialized and non-racialized women and identify factors that link race with complications and poor outcomes. The results should inform evidence-based, clinical and health policy targets that promote equity in maternal health.

Frailty is a state of declined function across multiple physiological systems that is more likely to be observed
in patients who have experienced a fragility fracture (e.g., hip fracture). Early identification of frailty is important as interventions, including post-fracture rehabilitation programs, may then be introduced to prevent functional decline, hospital admissions, and/or death. Such interventions, including post-fracture rehabilitation programs have been shown to improve symptoms, physical function, and health in patientsThe study aims to determine if the post-fracture rehabilitation program at Hamilton Health Sciences improves frailty scores in individuals who have experienced a fracture. The results will help inform rehabilitation assessments, identify opportunities to optimize patients’ rehabilitation programs to improve outcomes and prevent rehospitalization or subsequent fractures.

The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people live, work and access resources. Factors such as income, housing, education, access to food and others can be a major cause of health inequities, particularly when populations do not have access to the same resources. When health professionals refer families to community supports to address unmet needs, also called social prescribing, it can help to improve their social situation, which can improve health.

This study will screen children and families cared for in outpatient clinics at McMaster Children’s Hospital using a digital survey available in multiple languages, to determine if they have unmet social needs. Results will be used to build a social screening toolkit and create a pathway for referral to supports that improves the health of children with complex medical conditions.

Dr. Flavia Kessler Borges is a researcher at the Population Health Research Institute specializing in perioperative cardiac biomarkers, and perioperative strategies to improve outcomes in surgical patients, especially in hip fracture patients. Her research program enabled her to receive companion awards from the New Investigator Fund (NIF) and Early Career Award (ECA).

Dr. Borges’ NIF Funding is advancing perioperative research using genetic tools to determine if there are genetic markers that indicate which patients are at risk of experiencing a heart injury after noncardiac surgery.
This work will provide clinicians with cost-effective new tools that use a single blood sample to identify patients that are at high-risk of heart complications after surgery. She has also expanded her research to examine postoperative outcomes in older adults who suffer a hip fracture and successfully completed a trial demonstrating early surgery can improve several important patient outcomes.

Dr. Borges is now merging her expertise in cardiac biomarkers and hip fractures to lead an expanded trial, which will identify if it is possible to improve postoperative mortality in high-risk hip fracture patients.

Dr. Laura Duncan is a researcher at the Offord Centre for Child Studies whose Early Career Award (ECA) supported her work to develop and evaluate a Child and Youth Mental Health Information System in partnership with young people, families, and service providers. This system aims to better understand the mental health needs of young people and their families and use this information to plan services that respond to those needs. The system builds on the ways data is already collected from young people and families at McMaster Children’s Hospital’s Child and Youth Mental Health Program.

This research co-develops and evaluates ways to organize and use data to make it as reliable, useful and meaningful as possible for youth, caregivers, clinicians, service organizations and the mental health service system more broadly.

Dr. Duncan leveraged her ECA-funded research to establish a larger research program in partnership with other child and youth mental health service organizations in Hamilton that has also received funding through a SickKids-CIHR New Investigator Grant. Dr. Duncan’s goal is to create and increase the ability of child and youth mental health services to meet population needs, improving the lives of children, youth and their families.