Connecting for Care: Meet our Summer Student

We are currently wrapping up Phase 1 of Connecting for Care, and the survey will close on June 30th. This phase has involved the collection of survey data from individuals involved in child development and rehabilitation. If you are a researcher, clinician, a person who supports knowledge sharing, or a caregiver for a child with development or rehabilitation needs, and have not yet completed the survey, click on the link in the blog to participate before June 30, 2023.

Read on to meet our Summer Student Emma, and hear what she is excited to learn about.

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Brittany Curtis
I don’t want to be singled out. I just want to be safe: Balancing food culture and food allergy

For children with food allergy and their families, risk exists every time a child eats. A reaction could occur due to mislabeled foods, a serving spoon that wasn’t cleaned properly, or a young child whose innate desire to explore their world through sensory play leads to accidentally eating something to which they are allergic. These are only a few examples that could lead to a food allergic reaction.

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Brittany Curtis
Realigning our aspirational thinking: The right to eat in the face of risk

At a conference a number of years ago, I was sitting over dinner with some colleagues in various health disciplines, all of whom have a role in enhancing children’s eating and drinking experience. I asked the question: “Would you stop eating if someone told you that you were at risk of an aspiration event?” Without hesitation, everyone at the table said: No! That got all of us thinking about eating in the face of risk and if there were strategies that we could employ to encourage more children who are traditionally tube fed to be at the table.

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Brittany Curtis
Shared Health Language Access Interpreter Services with Allana Carlyle

Lack of available language translation or interpretation can prevent people from participating in research. To design research that better reflects the diversity of the community that our research serves, it is important to tailor the recruitment approach to the needs of potential participants. This includes developing strategies to support language concordance to allow for participation in a wide variety of primary languages.

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Brittany Curtis
ENRRICH Summer Studentship Launch

One of ENRRICH’s priorities is to support trainees to conduct research in the field of pediatric neurodevelopment and rehabilitation.

The purpose of the ENRRICH Summer Studentship is to recognize and prioritize the valuable skills and knowledge that comes from life experience. It has been developed to support principles of inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, and justice, and to enhance participation of groups who have been historically and systematically marginalized and excluded from studentship participation at the University of Manitoba.

Two studentships will be available per competition, and selections will be made by a two-round lottery system.

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Brittany Curtis
Invitation to Connect for Care

Our project title is Using social network analysis to understand knowledge translation in child development and rehabilitation.

The goal of this work is to improve families’ access to safe, effective health care.

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Brittany Curtis
Meet the ENRRICH External Advisory Committee

In today’s post, we are excited to introduce the ENRRICH External Advisory Committee.

This is, in part, an effort to be transparent about how ENRRICH functions. It is also a chance to thank these individuals for the important perspectives that they each bring to this research theme.

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Visuable
Q & A with ENRRICH Trainee Tegan Turner on Language Abilities in Preschool Children with Critical Congenital Heart Disease (CHD)

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common congenital defect.  It occurs in about 8 out of 1000 live births1, with approximately 25% of these infants having critical congenital heart disease (cCHD)2 and requiring complex cardiac surgery early in life to survive. Advances in medical and surgical care have allowed us to change our focus from survival to consider neurodevelopmental outcomes such as motor performance, cognition, and language skills.

Research has summarized motor and cognition outcomes among children with cCHD to better guide physicians and healthcare professionals manage these children.  However, our understanding of language outcomes in children with cCHD was a considerable knowledge gap. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of the expressive (communication) language and receptive (comprehension) language in children with cCHD and compared their language outcomes to children without cCHD.

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Visuable
Patient Engagement in Research

Patient Engagement is meaningful and active collaboration of families with lived experience (parents or caregivers, siblings, children and/or youth) as partners in research. There are many different levels of patient engagement and you do not have to engage in every level for every project, but the key here is meaningful and active participation. That means when patients are consulted, they have the potential to change the project.

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Summer Research Student with ENRRICH – Chloé Janse van Rensburg

The project that I am currently working on is titled “Determining the benefits and drawbacks of parents using their personal and social networks for recruitment in research projects”.

In our project, parent partner refers to parents of children with chronic conditions, who are members of a research team, making sure the research is relevant and important for families.

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Visuable
Creating Connections: Bringing clinicians together, research into practice, and clinicians into research

In a nutshell, The Children’s Therapy Initiative (CTI) Network is a joint program of service providers and provincial government departments. The overarching goal of the CTI Network is to provide coordinated, regionally based Audiology, Occupational Therapy (OT), Physiotherapy (PT) and Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) services to children and youth across the province.

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Brittany Curtis
Q & A with Dr. Joanne Parsons on a different way to approach ACL injury research

Despite 30 years and 32,000 research studies, the rate of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in girls remain high compared to boys. ACL injuries in the 5-14-year-old age group have the greatest rate of increase over the last 20 years. ACL injuries are usually approached in a biological way – with a focus on things like anatomy and hormone levels.

Our research team is exploring how gendered environments may be a possible influence on ACL injuries because, from birth, there are very strong expectations and beliefs around appropriate activities and behaviours for girls versus boys.

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Visuable