Written by Sarath Peiris
The commitment of $25.2 million in new funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) and partner institutions will enable the Saskatchewan Centre for Patient-Oriented Research (SCPOR) to build on the strong foundation it has established over the past five years and focus on continuing to improve the quality of health services for residents.
SCPOR, established in 2015 as one of 11 regional units under Canada’s Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research, has made strong gains in recruiting and empowering patients to advocate for their rights as equal partners in research, said Dr. Preston Smith, dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) and principal investigator on the SCPOR award.
“Patient orientation, inclusion and engagement is what it’s about,” said Smith. “In Saskatchewan, it also has to be seen through the lens of Indigenous health and the importance of engaging Indigenous People in patient-oriented research, which has been a key part of our efforts,’ he said.
“There’s no doubt the public wants to be cured of their illness, but they want the cure delivered in a way that is addressing their concerns. I want to keep expanding patient-oriented research, and to keep changing the culture among researchers to understand that at least some of the time, they should be answering patients’ questions,” said Smith.
The partner agencies providing a total $12.6 million in cash and in-kind contributions to match CIHR funding are: Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), USask, University of Regina, Saskatchewan Polytechnic, Health Quality Council (HQC), Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation, eHealth Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Cancer Agency and First Nations University of Canada.
Other significant collaborators are Patient Partners, Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, Métis Nation Saskatchewan, the First Nations and Métis Health and Wellness Research, Training and Knowledge Mobilization Network, the Saskatchewan Indigenous Mentorship Network, and the Saskatchewan Ministries of Health and Advanced Education.
Candace Skrapek, a patient advocate who has been involved with SCPOR since its inception, says the role of Patient Partners has grown in importance and acceptance over the past five years and will expand as the organization begins its second phase of operations in April 2022 with the new funding.
“Often health researchers can be really dedicated but focused only on one particular aspect of research. The early engagement of Patient Partners provides a more holistic view that helps design projects that are much more meaningful to people, and can be easily translated into health-care initiatives that improve health outcomes,” she said.
“SCPOR has tried very hard to foster that early engagement of Patient Partners. Over time there’s been a growing recognition by researchers that it drives innovation and can provide better solutions in the longer term.”
SCPOR’s Scientific Director Malcolm King said that the SHA, HQC and eHealth, who are SCPOR’s main partners in the health system, have been developing health information databases and methodologies to provide access to these databases over the past few years—something that’s incredibly important for researchers to use and learn from the data to optimize the health system.
He said a quadruple aim drives the process of optimizing the system: improving patient outcomes and experience; improving service provider experience; improving public health; and providing cost-effectiveness, or making the best use of financial resources available for healthcare. In phase two of SCPOR, the idea is to apply and test what has been learned since 2015, and embed these ideas of continuous quality improvement into the health system.
King sees a lot of synergy between what he learned over two decades through community-based research in several Indigenous communities, where community participation is an essential component of research, and the broader overall health research agenda in Saskatchewan.
With Indigenous health and Indigenous engagement being focuses of the new federal funding, both Smith and King say that capacity development through training a new cadre of young academics in patient-oriented research, and building the capacity of Indigenous communities to assume their role as active research partners, remain key not only over the duration of the new grant but when the federal funding ends after five years.
“We’ve devoted a lot of effort to training programs and training individuals, not just Indigenous people. It will pay dividends over the coming years as they come into the health research workforce and apply what they’ve learned,” said King. “We also provided extensive training for the health research community writ large in terms of models that allow them to work more effectively with Indigenous communities. This is going to lead to gains in health research knowledge over the next few years.”
With federal funding slated to end when the current disbursement runs out in five years, the second phase has to be all about succession planning for SCPOR—how patient-oriented research will be perpetuated through the strength of Saskatchewan’s education, health and government institution partnership, said Smith.
Smith and King both say leaders of SCPOR’s partner agencies are keen to seek a greater role in supporting research—something that will be reinforced when the value-added proposition of patient-oriented research and continuous quality improvement is demonstrated over the next few years.