Since The Royal unveiled its five-year plan in December 2020 to move to client- and family-centred care model, we have been working to break down the silos to enable a multi-disciplinary approach to care across the organization.
One of the opportunities that we have identified is to improve access to care through research. In practice, that means building care teams that include clinicians, researchers, healthcare professionals and learners, and of course clients and their families at the centre. This also means leveraging our unique access to leading technologies for care and embedding the social determinants of health.
When we join up research and care, you create not only more access to care, but you also give researchers a clearer view of where the urgency is greatest.
The brain is one of the most complex systems known to man. There are infinite questions we can ask and research – so how do we pick? How do we decide where to focus our talents, our funding, and access to our technology?
We believe that our well-informed interprofessional teams should build and prioritize the questions together, within the context of all the data available and research that has come before.
When we build the questions together – connect the questions that clinicians are asking with the researchers in a position to answer them – we get better care.
And when clients are involved in their care, outcomes are better. Their engagement creates impact. They are, after all, experts in their own lived experience.
We also know that for the client, participation in research provides hope and a sense of purpose – they are contributing to collective knowledge. At the same time, raising the profile of research helps to erode the stigma of mental illness, because it clearly categorizes mental health as health and research as care.
While that collaborative approach might seem obvious to some, research has always been viewed as distinct from care. But research is care.
If we are successful, we will truly create a learning health care centre. We will move to a position in which we have leading (rather than lagging) metrics that drive our system. We will develop the processes and policies that enable our teams to deliver strategies to address those metrics. And we will engage clients and families of The Royal in research studies with clinician involvement. In short, we will move The Royal from a hospital that does research to a research hospital.
This was an edited excerpt from “Translating Mental Health Research for Evidence-Based Client and Family-Centred Care,” a Conversations at The Royal event that featured: Dr. Florence Dzierszinski, president of the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research (IMHR) and vice-president of research at The Royal; Glenda O’Hara, chair of the Client Advisory Council at the Royal; and Dr. Michael Seto, director of the Forensic Mental Health Research Unit. Watch the full broadcast right here.
