“PSI Foundation has always been supportive of this kind of research. They give you the freedom to study the things you know are important, but that other agencies may not see as under their purview. They trust you as a clinician that you know what’s important.” – Dr. Carol-anne Moulton

Checklists have been praised as a simple and cost-effective way to improve patient safety. But can they be implemented in an operating room (OR) without considering a hospital’s surgical culture?

A landmark paper published in 2009 demonstrated that a simple surgical safety checklist (SCC) cut morbidity and mortality around the time of surgery by about one third. Within just a few years, governments in many jurisdictions – including the Ontario provincial government – required all hospitals to implement a similar checklist in their operating rooms. Very quickly, the SSC shifted from a recommended tool designed to improve patient care to a mandatory policy, deeply enmeshed in hospital politics. Dr. Carol-anne Moulton, a staff surgeon and medical director of the OR at Toronto General Hospital and Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, had some questions about the SSC, the claims that had been made about its impact on patient care, and the ways its implementation had – or had not – changed practice in the OR over the past decade.

“There’s an assumption that if we say something is for patient safety, people will just do it, but this isn’t the case,” she says. “Surgeons and medical staff care about patient safety, but we need to question how we bring safety initiatives into a culture or institution so they work the way we want them to.”

Using her research experience in studying surgical judgment, Dr. Moulton, along with sociologist Dr. Elise Paradis and anthropologist Melanie Hammond Mobilio, studied the culture of the operating room with respect to the checklist. With PSI Foundation funding, they focused on the practices at one Ontario hospital, observing surgeries, interviewing operating room team members, and conducting staff surveys.

Their findings revealed a lack of clarity around what it means to “do the checklist.” For some, the checklist is understood as the physical piece of paper (i.e., the tool itself), while for others, the checklist is understood more broadly as a practice loosely tied but not limited to the physical checklist. This key finding raised further questions around compliance rates. Despite the study site having a reported compliance rate of nearly 100%, the physical checklist was rarely used. Instead, OR teams used different processes – often dependent on the expertise and preferences of the surgeon or the workflow of the surgery – that acted as some version of the checklist, though without the standardization one might expect from checklist-based practice.

They also found that the checklist itself did not inherently foster teamwork, despite the claims made by some checklist advocates. Surgical culture, including existing power dynamics and institutional structural issues (e.g., staff changes over a case due to breaks), limited the sense of a cohesive team in ways that could not be easily corrected by a single intervention. And the lack of clarity around exactly what “doing the checklist” meant, coupled with a reporting system designed to report quantifiable compliance rates to the Ministry of Health and Long-term Care, added to the complexity around a seemingly “simple” intervention.

The qualitative data the team collected during the study helps to describe some of the main challenges surrounding implementation of the checklist. “The study highlights the need to think about these issues at a deeper level,” says Dr. Moulton. “Understanding the culture is critical and doing something about it is really slow and hard. There is no quick fix, and hospitals need to dedicate resources to actually improving the situation.”

Despite the challenges of checklists, Dr. Moulton believes that they can be effective tools to improve patient safety – if the culture of the OR is considered during design and implementation. She hopes that her research keeps the conversation about the SSC and its value going among OR personnel and hospital leadership.

“The work challenges people to see that we may not be as good as we say we are,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with declaring it, and we have to understand it if we’re going to get better.”

Dr. Kimia Honarmand is currently a critical care physician at London Health Science Centre. She led research during her critical care fellowship training with supervisor Dr. Ian Ball to survey health care providers and the Canadian public about their support for two controversial organ donation protocols that may be used after circulatory determination of death. The surveys not only demonstrated support for organ donation, but also kick-started an entire program of research.

Two protocols may be used for cardiac donation after circulatory determination of death (cardiac DCDD):

• Direct procurement and perfusion (DPP): the heart is removed from the donor after circulatory determination of death and placed in a machine where its activity is restored until transplantation
• Normothermic regional perfusion (NRP): circulation and cardiac activity are restarted in the body after circulatory determination of death, although blood supply to the brain is interrupted, and the heart is then removed from the donor

While these techniques have the potential to increase the number of organ donors, they have yet to be conducted in Canada, partly due to concerns about their acceptability to the Canadian public and health care providers.

PSI: What did the Resident Research Grant allow you to study?

Dr. Kimia Honarmand:

Health care providers and experts in transplantation have expressed concerns about these two approaches being accepted in Canada. Would the public and clinicians be comfortable with these protocols? Would there be any ethical concerns? Would there be any backlash? The only way to find out is to ask people.

We developed two national surveys, one for health care providers who manage organ donors or transplant recipients and one for the general public, to ask about their support for these protocols. The surveys went through rigourous pre-testing and pilot testing to ensure they were accurate and comprehensive.

PSI: What did the surveys find?

Dr. Kimia Honarmand:

The surveys demonstrated that the majority of health care providers and Canadians are supportive of the protocols. Nearly 90% of health care providers and 84% of the general public supported DPP, and 71% of health care providers and 66% of the general public supported implementing NRP.

We found it interesting that even though we thought the NRP protocol would receive next to no support, the majority of respondents in the general public were supportive. They had a lot of positive sentiment toward organ donation in general, even the controversial protocols.

PSI: What are the next steps for the research?

Dr. Kimia Honarmand:

The funding was relatively small, but it spawned an entire program of research with the goal of ensuring the implementation of cardiac DCDD is done in a manner consistent with Canadians’ values.

Since the surveys were completed, we have published three articles about the surveys, presented at a national forum led by Canadian Blood Services and Trillium Gift of Life Network and presented at the Canadian Critical Care Forum.

Our survey findings have generated a lot of interest in the critical care community. At the meetings, a lot of the conversation kept referring to the survey findings. There was widespread recognition that these findings are important in making sure that if we’re going to implement these protocols in Canada, we do it in a way that respects Canadians’ values.

And we have successfully applied for funding from Canadian Blood Services to delve further into these topics. We are interviewing health care providers and the public to understand their perspectives and find the best way forward to implementing cardiac DCDD in Canada.

PSI: How did this research grant contribute to your career?

Dr. Kimia Honarmand:

This program of research that has evolved from the PSI grant has become the primary focus of my research career. Since finishing my medical training, I’ve continued to be engaged in this topic, leading this program of research with mentorship from Dr. Ian Ball and identifying ways that we can mitigate any concerns about these protocols and find the path forward to implementing them in Canada.

I owe a lot of the successes I’ve seen in last couple of years to that relatively small grant. This research has become a prominent feature of my career. It has helped drive my career path in a much clearer direction and solidified my interest in doing research in organ donation and transplantation.

PSI: Why is it important for PSI Foundation to fund resident research?

Dr. Kimia Honarmand:

This kind of opportunity, even if it’s a small grant, can really help shape the career of an early career, keen researcher. When you’re training, you’re often interested in so many different topics and you have to lean into one; having an area of research where you’re financially supported and where you have the opportunity to lead research that actually has impact on the community can help an early career researcher feel confident that they are on the right career path.

A grant like this helps a early career researcher solidify where to go with their career. It’s an important validation that what you’re doing is important to society.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do this research without PSI. It was important for me to know that colleagues recognize and value this work.” – Dr. Fiona Kouyoumdjian

Dr. Fiona Kouyoumdjian’s research is helping to increase the visibility of a population that is often kept out of view – people who experience incarceration. Her PSI Foundation–funded study provides a foundation of information about the health care needs and health care use of this group of people, which until now, has not been well understood.

From her part-time role as a family physician at a provincial correctional facility, Dr. Kouyoumdjian knows firsthand that this population has complex health care needs, yet there has been little research about their health care use.

“I see a lot of opportunity to improve health care for this population in both correctional facilities and in the community,” she says. “There’s a lot to be done to understand imprisonment in Canada and to improve health care and the health status of this population.”

She received PSI Foundation funding in 2016 to study health care use by people who have experienced imprisonment, both during their time in custody and after their release into the community.

Dr. Kouyoumdjian and her team linked correctional data from the Ministry of the Solicitor General with health administrative databases. With these datasets, they followed the population of people released from provincial correctional facilities in 2010, which was more than 50,000 people, comparing their health care needs and use with the general population.

The team found that people who experienced incarceration had higher rates of health care use overall compared to the general population, including higher numbers of visits to primary care, other ambulatory care, and emergency departments, and higher rates of hospitalization.

Dr. Kouyoumdjian says that the baseline health of this population is worse than the general population, and they experience higher rates of health issues like injuries and overdoses, particularly around the time of release – so it may not be surprising that their health care use is high.

Notably, they found that a large percentage (40%) of people who had been incarcerated did not see a primary care physician in the two years after release, which is particularly troubling considering the higher health care needs of this population. “People have a lot of competing priorities when they leave provincial prisons,” she says. “Taking care of your health can be challenging when you’re dealing with urgent issues like finding housing, restarting your benefits, and trying to rebuild relationships.”

By showing that the time of release from prison is particularly challenging, Dr. Kouyoumdjian says that her research suggests that there are opportunities to provide interventions that support people at this time, for example programs that link people released from prison with primary health care. “We need to think about opportunities to support health more broadly,” she says. “It’s a shared responsibility between community health care and correctional facilities.”

Dr. Kouyoumdjian adds that this study is just a first step in understanding the needs of this population, but that it has strong potential to inform interventions. “This is a population with a substantial burden of disease and substantial health care needs,” she says. “We need to invest resources in their health care.”

“PSI funding was important to our study, and it allowed us to achieve our goals. We could work with vendors to create the interventions and hire a research assistant to do data collection, which made the study more robust.” – Dr. Jennifer Tsang

Dr. Jennifer Tsang, an intensivist at Niagara Health, would like to see more community hospitals in Ontario increase their research capacity, and as a researcher herself, she understands the importance of dedicated funding allocated to community research.

She says that programs like PSI’s Healthcare Research by Community Physicians Grant are essential. “It’s challenging for community hospitals to apply for funding and compete against an academic centre. The academic hospital and staff often have better track records of research that give them an advantage,” she says. “Having separate community health research grants really helps individuals like myself who are leading research in a community setting.”

Dr. Tsang received a Healthcare Research by Community Physicians Grant from PSI Foundation to develop interventions to improve adherence to pain, agitation and delirium (PAD) guidelines, specifically the frequency of assessing patients for PAD, in the intensive care unit at Niagara Health.

PAD clinical guidelines recommend screening for pain and agitation four times per 12-hour shift, and once per 12-hour shift for delirium. But Dr. Tsang saw that community centres are often behind in adopting guidelines.

She and her team developed an e-learning module targeting nurses and laminated reminder tools placed at each bedside, and they reminded physicians to talk about PAD during multi-disciplinary rounds with a note left on the computer on wheels. They also developed interventions targeting family members: a team of volunteers interviewed family members about the patient to develop a personalized approach to managing PAD, and pamphlets and a video provided information about delirium for family members. Finally, they displayed posters in the ICU about delirium, its importance and the team approach to managing it.

Together, the interventions increased the number of patients who were screened according to the guidelines for pain and agitation, though the delirium assessment did not change. The study did not examine why delirium assessments did not change, but it could be due to the greater time required for delirium screening or the belief that screening will not change how the condition is managed.

“Sometimes we try complicated interventions, but sometimes simple things like these reminders have the biggest impact,” she says. “Also, in my community hospital, I don’t have the resources of an academic hospital. We had to be very practical.”

Dr. Tsang notes that while there may be challenges in adopting guidelines at a community hospital, the study shows that it is possible using practical, low-cost interventions. Involving frontline staff in the design of the interventions and as “local champions” to encourage and support staff during implementation, as well as approaching the interventions through the lens of quality improvement, all seemed to be important in increasing adherence to PAD guidelines in a community setting.

Dr. Tsang says that her grant is just one example of important, relevant research done in a community setting, and she would encourage more centres to pursue projects relevant to their community.

“Most community centres have primarily focused on delivery of clinical services rather than conduct of research programs or projects, but I think this is starting to change,” she says. “We need more community hospitals embarking on research, and PSI funding is critical for making that happen.”

“PSI has a good reputation of supporting studies that have impact on daily practice. It supports practicing physicians’ research that will have immediate impact on the practice of their colleagues.” – Dr. Marcel Ruzicka

New automated blood pressure monitors have significant advantages over older monitors. One such advantage is the ability to take blood pressure measurements without medical personnel in the room, eliminating the possibility of “white coat phenomenon,” which is thought to result in higher readings when medical personnel are present. New PSI-funded research suggests that different ways of taking automated measurements may need interpretation if they are to be used to accurately diagnose and manage hypertension.

“The circumstance under which blood pressure measurement is taken, more so than the technique, is crucial for estimating blood pressure,” says Dr. Marcel Ruzicka, a nephrologist specializing in kidney-related hypertension at The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. The differences in measurements among techniques can be large enough that they may affect a physician’s decision about whether a patient needs to be treated for hypertension.

“It’s not a question of which method is best,” says Dr. Ruzicka. “Our study provides evidence that different blood pressure targets might be appropriate if you use a different measurement method from the technique used for the published blood pressure target.”

With a PSI Foundation Clinical Research Grant, Dr. Ruzicka and his team compared different ways of measuring blood pressure to look for differences in the measurements. A total of 78 patients completed the study, during which their blood pressure was measured on two consecutive days using different methods: using automated devices both attended and unattended by a nurse, and using an ambulatory blood pressure measurement device that took measurements every 20-30 minutes over a 24-hour period.

Their results suggest that resting blood pressure readings were not significantly different whether the measurement was fully or partially attended, or even unattended. Most importantly, they found that resting blood pressure – regardless of whether medical personnel were in the room or not – was significantly lower compared to the 24-hour average, suggesting that the ambulatory measurement may be crucial for hypertension diagnosis and management.

“The ambulatory measurement includes everything in your life, and for most people, there aren’t many times when you sit alone and quiet, as you do with resting blood pressure,” says Dr. Ruzicka. “In a way, this result is not surprising.”

The study is not meant to discourage practices from using any particular technique. Instead, Dr. Ruzicka says that it’s more important to understand that the techniques yield different results, and physicians need to understand these differences when diagnosing hypertension.

“This information is crucial for family physicians and specialists in order to provide them with a guide of how to interpret these measurements,” he says. “We hope that eventually these results will be reflected in the guidelines [for diagnosis and management of hypertension].”

“Because PSI is geared toward physicians, there’s almost an unwritten understanding of why you’re doing the research and that it’s for the end goal of treating our patients better. We don’t have to prove that our research has clinical relevance.” – Dr. Kim Wong

Total knee replacement is a common procedure done in many hospitals, and it is known to be associated with a significant amount of post-operative pain. Many interventions exist to address this pain, but since a myriad of techniques can be used, choosing the optimal technique can be a source of much discussion in the operating room. Local practices vary based on the location and time of team members’ training, and orthopedic and anesthesia teams may have different views of the best approach to use.

“Everyone seems to have differing opinions about which analgesic intervention to use perioperatively,” says Dr. Kim Wong, an anesthesiologist at Health Sciences North in Sudbury. “But at the end of the day, everyone wants the patient to go home with as little pain as possible and as soon as possible.”

Evidence on the subject has been definitively inconclusive so far, with mostly small, comparative single intervention studies. Dr. Wong saw the need for a larger interdisciplinary study that compared different combinations of interventions used in real world practice on patient outcomes, with the goal of providing clarity on the best approach to use.

She received a grant from PSI Foundation to lead a five-arm randomized blinded trial that involved both the orthopedic and anesthesia departments at Health Sciences North. They compared different combinations of three pain management interventions used before and during total knee replacement surgery: intrathecal morphine, femoral nerve block (a regional anesthetic injected into the upper thigh) and periarticular infiltration (local anesthetic and anti-inflammatory injected around the knee joint). They evaluated whether intrathecal morphine alone, different pairs of the interventions or a combination of all three affected time for patients to reach discharge criteria, their pain scores and their narcotics needs after surgery to control pain.

The study team found that all of the arms of the study met discharge criteria, with patients being discharged by the afternoon of the second day. But further analysis showed that any combination of two interventions had better pain outcomes than intrathecal morphine alone, though the combination without intrathecal morphine resulted in less itchiness. Surprisingly, the combination of three interventions did not result in significantly better outcomes.

“I hope the study gives surgeons and anesthesiologists comfort that they can choose the interventions that they do best, as long as they provide two,” says Dr. Wong. “In my own clinical practice, I can tailor my approach to accommodate a patient’s individual medical history with the comfort of knowing that I’m not placing them at a disadvantage of getting out of the hospital faster or with less pain.”

Dr. Wong says that it was ambitious to lead a five-arm trial with enough statistical power to be clinically relevant, and the study team did have challenges with recruitment. As a result, PSI Foundation funding was essential to the study’s success. “It allowed us to address the challenges without having to worry about stopping the study or not having a powered study that would lend less credibility to the results,” she says. “The funding allowed the financial buffer to reflect the realities of clinical research.”

Research from a PSI Foundation–funded team has led to the development of a first-of-its-kind assessment of seniors’ biomedical and social vulnerability. The Frailty and Vulnerability Evaluation (FAVE) tool, developed by Dr. Ross Upshur and his team at Bridgepoint Active Healthcare and the Department of Family and Community Medicine in Toronto with funding from PSI Foundation, is a step towards higher quality care for seniors.

Dr. Upshur’s career has largely been focused on senior care, starting with electives as an undergraduate in medical school, followed by several years as a primary care physician in a rural area with a large senior population. In recent years of his research career, he and his team have been interested in developing tools to help physicians in family practice manage the complex health care needs of seniors.

They identified that while certain aspects of seniors’ health were becoming better understood, there was still a significant gap – social isolation. “There’s growing interest and recognition from the health system around frailty,” says Dr. Upshur. “Frailty is important, but not the whole story.” Yet, no clinical tools in primary care looked at both frailty and social vulnerability, so he and his team, with input from an expert advisory committee, developed one.

The new tool, FAVE, asks seniors about their health and functional abilities, but importantly, also asks about their social wellbeing, including their loneliness, living arrangements, feeling of safety and economic insecurity. “People are now talking about loneliness and isolation as an issue,” says Dr. Upshur. “A primary care physician might notice that a patient might have issues with loneliness and vulnerability, but collecting this information has not been systematic.”

With funding from PSI Foundation, the team validated FAVE and compared the performance to existing measures, such as the frailty score and physician judgment, to determine if it is a reliable predictor of an individual’s health and wellbeing.

More than 260 patients from 10 Family Health Teams from urban, suburban and rural practices completed the tool. Seniors completed the FAVE assessment on paper or electronically prior to an appointment with their family physician. The team also asked the family physician for an assessment of the individual’s frailty and wellbeing, blinded from the patient’s score on the tool.

They found that patients thought the survey was user friendly, and importantly, that FAVE scores correlated well with seniors’ self-reported health, as well as physician assessments and frailty scores.

To understand whether FAVE is a good predictor of an individual’s future health, the team is now looking at patients’ charts one year after they complete the tool, particularly to examine the patient’s total number of health care transitions (such as being admitted to the emergency department, long-term care or a return home), and the total number of days spent at home. The analysis is currently underway but will help determine whether FAVE, physician judgment, the frailty score, or a combination is the best predictor of a patient’s future health care transitions.

Dr. Upshur notes that PSI Foundation plays an important role in this type of research. “It can be difficult to get funding for small-scale projects that engage local partners, but PSI Foundation is a strong supporter of this type of research,” says Dr. Upshur. “They focus on research that is meaningful to clinical practice.”

As Ontario includes an already large and growing population of seniors, Dr. Upshur hopes that FAVE will help primary care physicians care for both the health and social needs of seniors. “The tool is just one component of a systematic approach for seniors in the community by primary care physicians,” he says. “It’s an important step towards more comprehensive, appropriate, compassionate and high quality care for seniors.”

A potentially practice-changing study led by a PSI Foundation-funded surgical resident has challenged long-held beliefs about care for small bowel obstructions (SBOs).

SBO, a blockage in the intestine often cause by scar tissue (or “adhesions”) from previous surgery, is a common condition, representing about 20% of all hospital admissions for abdominal pain. A small number of patients whose conditions don’t resolve with usual treatment receive surgery, but most patients, about 80%, recover from SBO through treatment with bowel rest, IV fluids and gastric decompression. These patients are considered to be successfully treated and released from hospital, yet many of them will return – sometimes as often as every few months – with a recurrence.

Dr. Ramy Behman, a surgical resident with the University of Toronto, wanted to study the long-term natural history of SBO and potentially improve treatment. “We’ve been treating SBO the same way for a long time. Some people bounce back from an SBO, but then they’re dealing with it every few months,” says Dr. Behman. “SBOs aren’t very well studied, so a better understanding of the natural history could be helpful to improve treatment.”

Dr. Behman applied for and received PSI Foundation funding, which he says was crucial to the research, especially so early in his career. “I don’t know how we would have done the study without the funding,” he says. “And having people outside of your research committee think that the research is worthwhile is very encouraging when you’re just starting off.”

With a Resident Research Grant, Dr. Behman looked at 10 years of health administrative data, identifying nearly 40,000 patients in Ontario admitted to hospital for their first SBO during that time period. They then followed how the patients were treated on that occasion and any following recurrences and tracked the outcomes. The large dataset allowed them to examine the different ways that SBOs are managed and how outcomes are affected.

“We were one of the first groups to really step back and look at the long-term disease course,” he says. “And what we found was challenging to the dogma.”

Physicians have long believed that surgery for SBO would increase the risk of recurrence by creating new adhesions and usually don’t recommended surgery for SBO unless other treatments are unsuccessful. But Dr. Behman’s research suggested that this actually isn’t the case – in fact, surgery could reduce the risk of recurrence. According to their results, patients with SBO treated with surgery – whether on the first or subsequent occurrences – cut the risk of recurrence by about half.

“Operating can take patients off the recurrence cycle. It can really change the trajectory of disease for patients,” says Dr. Behman.

Surgery does have its own risks, namely the risk of complications that could potentially have been avoided, as well as a greater upfront cost than standard treatment. Dr. Behman and his team are analyzing the cost-utility to examine whether the greater upfront costs are offset by fewer hospital readmissions due to recurrences, and he is hoping to publish the results soon.

He notes that the study may influence guidelines for SBO management and help physicians make informed decisions about how the condition can be managed.

“This isn’t a uniform prescription for every patient with SBO, but it adds to our understanding of the disease and facilitates informed decision making,” he says. “The optimal practice will be the right intervention for the right patient.”

As the child of immigrants, Dr. Shixin (Cindy) Shen has had a long-standing interest in immigrant health issues, including cancer screening. While pursuing the Public Health and Preventive Medicine Residency at the University of Toronto, she found that there was little information about the barriers to colorectal cancer screening that immigrants in Ontario may face. “Colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of cancer, and 40% of all immigrants in Canada live in Ontario,” she says. “Yet, there wasn’t much information about colorectal cancer screening in immigrants in Ontario, despite the fact that they tend to have lower screening rates.”

To address this knowledge gap, Dr. Shen and her supervisors, Dr. Aisha Lofters and Dr. Richard Glazier, looked at the immigration and non-immigration factors that influence screening rates in immigrants, in order to get a better understanding of which are the most important.

They looked at data from a number of health care administrative databases, as well as the Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada’s Permanent Resident Database, which contains records of individuals who obtained immigrant status since 1985.

Dr. Shen found that within the immigrant population there were significant differences in rates of screening non-adherence, related to different factors. Among the factors related to immigration, an individual’s region of birth and the income level of that region, as well as their immigration class (economic, family or refugee) were the most important factors that predicted screening non-adherence. Among the factors not related to immigration, individuals with no or moderate use of the health care system and those not rostered to a care team were less likely to be screened.

The results emphasize the health inequalities that immigrants may face in Ontario. “Some of these factors, especially when combined, contributed to significant disparities in screening uptake,” says Dr. Shen. “For example, among refugees from low-income countries who were not rostered and who lived in low-income areas, the rate of non-adherence to screening was 71%, compared to 25% for economic immigrants from high-income countries who were rostered and lived in high-income areas.”

The study was supported by a Resident Research Grant from PSI Foundation, which was critical for allowing the team to access the multiple databases and to support Dr. Shen’s work on the study. “The funding from PSI Foundation allowed me to lead the study from beginning to end, which was a very helpful learning experience,” she says. “I was able to further develop my skills in critical thinking, problem solving, and evidence generation, which will be helpful in my career as a public health physician.”

Dr. Shen notes that the study is just the starting point in understanding the screening barriers in this population, and that further research is needed to explore these factors in more depth. Ultimately, she hopes that the research can be used to help policymakers find ways to increase screening rates in this priority population.

“We know that screening is important for reducing cancer incidence and death rates, and we know that there are social factors that lead to poorer access to services and poorer health status,” she says. “With this research, we hope to have a better understanding of the potential causes of differential access to preventive care, so that we can address them properly and bridge the gap in health outcomes. The goal is to level the playing field so that everyone can lead healthy lives.”

Health professionals agree that breastfeeding is important for long-term child health, and it has also been suggested by policymakers as a way to reduce the risk of poverty and household food insecurity (HFI). But a recent PSI Foundation–funded study has challenged the conventional wisdom regarding breastfeeding duration and HFI, suggesting that it may be more important to focus on other strategies to reduce poverty.

“The benefits of breastfeeding are well recognized, but will it protect families from household food insecurity? Maybe not,” says Dr. Peter Wong, a pediatrician in Toronto.

Because breastmilk substitutes are expensive and could take money away from a household’s food budget, policymakers have suggested that encouraging longer duration of breastfeeding can be one way to decrease the risk of HFI. No research demonstrating the effectiveness of this strategy had previously been done, although studies have shown that the presence of HFI may adversely affect the duration of breastfeeding.

With a PSI Foundation Healthcare Research by Community Physicians grant, Dr. Wong and a team of researchers led by Drs. Patricia Parkin, Jonathon Maguire, Cory Borkhoff and Catherine Birken at TARGetKids!, a research group that focuses on early childhood health, explored this question. A unique research group in Canada, TARGetKids! includes a study population of 10,000 healthy children recruited at community-based practices to provide information about their growth, development and lifestyle to help researchers answer questions about this understudied group.

Dr. Wong and his colleagues surveyed 3,000 families from TARGetKids!, asking questions about breastfeeding duration, household food insecurity and family income. Surprisingly, they did not find an association between breastfeeding duration and HFI, suggesting that shorter duration does not increase the risk of HFI in their study population.

While Dr. Wong notes that the TARGetKids! study group provided access to a large study sample, he also says that the participants were not necessarily reflective of the population where HFI is a pressing concern, which may have influenced the results. Still, the study suggests that breastfeeding on its own may not be enough to help families struggling with poverty and HFI.

“To address household food insecurity, we need a higher level, upstream strategy that addresses more societal problems,” says Dr. Wong. “We need policies that will reduce insufficient income and poor employment. That’s where we’ll make a greater difference.”

Dr. Wong and the team are now planning to examine how breastfeeding and other health-related factors might influence measures of early childhood health, such as nutrition, development and cardiometabolic health. His primary role as a practising pediatrician, as well as his interest in community engagement, public health and epidemiology, gives him unique insight into these types of research questions. “As community physicians, we interact with families and kids on a daily basis, and we have a good appreciation for their health and social challenges,” he says. “We are able to formulate research questions that really have an impact on the health of families and communities.”

And he appreciates that PSI Foundation is supportive of physicians like him who do not have access to the same resources as academic researchers. “Full-time community clinicians have a challenging time competing in the same funding pool as academic researchers,” he says. “PSI Foundation demonstrates that physicians really do care about medical research and about asking questions that address the health of Ontarians.”