“The funding we received from PSI has helped researchers in the community hospitals, like ourselves, to connect with each other, learn from each other and build research programs in our own respectively community hospitals. The data that came from the work that was funded by PSI were by and large drawn from frontline clinicians and researchers in community hospitals.”

-Dr. Jennifer Tsang

About Dr. Jennifer Tsang

Dr. Jennifer Tsang is a Physician Research Lead, Intensivist, and Co-Director of Critical Care Research at Niagara Health; Regional Deputy Research Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at McMaster University; School of Medicine Research Lead at McMaster University’s Niagara Regional Campus; and Associate Professor of Medicine at McMaster University. Dr. Tsang’s research focuses on research capacity building in community hospitals and community-based distributive medical education.

Her medical training began at University of Ottawa, where she completed her MD in Internal Medicine–followed by a Critical Care fellowship at the University of Toronto. In 2013, she obtained her PhD in molecular biology and completed the Royal College Clinician Investigator Program at the University of Toronto.

About the Funded Study

Working as a community physician in the Niagara region, Dr. Tsang noticed a disparity between community hospitals versus academic hospitals when it came to health research output and participation in the research world — especially within intensive care units (ICUs).

With her PSI Healthcare Research by Community Physicians grant, Dr. Tsang and Co-Principal Investigator Dr. Alexandra Binnie set out to break down these barriers and to learn how to engage community researchers. As the cofounders of the Canadian Community ICU Research Network (CCIRNet), the two partnered with the network with the end-goals of fostering a community of practice, offering mentorship and training, and building research capacity in community hospital ICUs.

Digging deeper, Dr. Tsang and her team wanted to explore the factors that influence community ICU research participation and program development; and what was essential for implementing and sustaining a community ICU research program.

Impact of the Funded Study

With support from PSI, the results of this qualitative, descriptive study produced a research toolkit to support community ICU physicians interested in implementing a research program within their hospitals.

Following the principles of integrated knowledge translation (iKT), Drs. Tsang and Binnie worked with physicians who represented the toolkit’s intended users, including: CCIRNet members, community ICU clinicians, research staff, and administrators. Drawing on members’ lived experiences in developing community ICU research programs, along with preliminary findings from participant interviews, they compiled practical recommendations for launching, implementing, and sustaining these programs.

Yet, Dr. Tsang notes there is more work to be done on a systematic level. “Findings from this study highlight the need for more support from leaders at policy makers at the local community hospital level, the provincial level and the national level,” says Dr. Tsang.

“While the current study identified key strategies for strengthening community hospital research at an individual and organizational level, less is known about the strategies required at a systems level. These gaps have highlighted the need to now explore the perspectives of leaders from community hospitals as well as those at provincial and national levels to inform policy recommendations for strengthening community hospital research capacity at a systems level.”

With the online toolkit now available for use through the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, Ontario physicians and policymakers alike can have a helping hand in filling essential gaps within the medical research space of community ICUs.