“Patients and caregivers are a primary source of wisdom about how their healthcare could be better. This project puts them in the driver’s seat, identifying which areas of care should be improved first.” – Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw
PSI Foundation is pleased to announce Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw as the recipient of the 2024 PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation (KT) Fellowship.
About Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw
Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw is a General Internal Medicine Physician and Clinician Scientist at the University Health Network. She is also an Adjunct Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). She was awarded a CIHR-IHSPR Rising Star Award in 2019 and holds over $600,000 in CIHR funding as principal applicant. Her research focuses on the quality of in-hospital and outpatient care, as well as the organization of physician services.
About the PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship
Knowledge translation research aims at transitioning research discoveries to the real world to improve health outcomes. The PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship – valued at $300,000 for over two or three years – helps protect a promising new clinician investigator’s research time, allowing the Fellow to undertake high-impact translational research in Ontario.
Dr. Lapointe-Shaw highlights the importance of supporting early career physician researchers.
“The PSI Graham Farquharson KT Fellowship offers much-needed stability to early physician researchers, allowing them time to focus on their research and KT work. This time is pivotal to launching one’s career.”
Fellowship Funds to be Used for Quality Improvement on General Medical Wards
General medical wards care for patients admitted to hospital for common conditions such as heart failure, lung disease, pneumonia and falls. The number of patients cared for on such wards has increased over the past decade, and is expected to continue to grow in line with population aging. Learning what matters most to patients and their families can provide direction to quality improvement efforts. This project will elicit patient and caregiver priorities for improvement on general medical hospital wards, in order to drive quality improvement that is aligned with their preferences.
Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw and her team will use group concept mapping to first elicit contributors to the patient and caregiver experience, and then ask patients and caregivers to rate and sort these ideas to create a map of key concepts, and to identify the top priorities for quality improvement. Throughout all steps of the process, they will focus on recruiting a diverse group of participants, to reflect the broad experience and perspectives of the general medical community.
The Ontario General Medicine Quality Improvement Network (GEMQIN) is an Ontario Health-funded program that brings together clinicians and administrators from Ontario hospitals to improve the quality of care provided on general medical wards. All data and reporting in GeMQIN is produced by GEMINI, Canada‘s largest hospital data research network. The outputs of group concept mapping will be used to develop new quality indicators for GEMQIN physician and hospital performance reports, as well as improvement initiatives in the general medical healthcare community.
