News Archive

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Trevor Skutezky, RCPS-EM Resident, and co-investigator Dr. Corinne Hohl, Associate Professor, as they recently received a $5,000 grant through the CAEP Research Committee to support their research project “Improving patient care by engaging Emergency Department staff in a participatory design of a Patient Safety Event reporting platform at an urban tertiary care hospital.”

Patient Safety Events (PSEs) are unwanted or unexpected events that occur during medical care. PSE under-reporting is common; thus, the true rate and nature of PSEs in the ED remain unknown. The study objective is to develop a new mechanism to capture comprehensive, reliable and high-quality data on PSEs for quality improvement, research and surveillance.

Congratulations to Ms. Jingfei Zhang for receiving a 2016 Faculty of Medicine Summer Student Research Program award to carry out a study on “Understanding the perspectives of patients, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners and medical doctors for their need of an electronic communication tool for documentation and surveillance of concomitant TCM-prescription medication usage”.

This award will fund an 8-week summer research project with primary supervisor, Dr. Kendall Ho. Support for FoM SSRP projects is provided by a combination of internal funding, private donors, health charities and institutional partners.

Dr. Corinne Hohl, an Associate Professor at the UBC Department of Emergency Medicine, received a major 1.16M CIHR operating grant to support her research on reducing adverse drug events (ADEs), the unintended and harmful events associated with medications.

Her project “When Treatments Harm: Building Better Systems and Enhancing Research Capacity to Reduce Adverse Drug Events” will include multiple research objectives and also aims to train the next generation of health researchers to tackle this pervasive problem. Knowledge translation is an essential component of the program. Dr. Hohl has formed strong partnerships with not-for-profit organisations, policy makers and industry which will allow the findings to be disseminated and ensure rapid uptake of her findings.

The potential impacts of this research program include improving clinical care delivery by preventing and mitigating adverse drug events, improving health outcomes, and enabling more efficient and less costly healthcare.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Corinne Hohl, an Associate Professor at the UBC Department of Emergency Medicine, and her research team as they recently received a $100,088 grant through CIHR to support their research project “Factors Contributing to the Development of Preventable Adverse Drug Events”.

Adverse drug events are a leading cause of hospital and emergency department admissions, accounting for 12% of all emergency visits. Every year in B.C., adverse drug events cause more than 200,000 ED visits and cost approximately $90 million.

Yet, up to 70% of adverse drug events are consistently identified as preventable, with 30% occurring simply because health care providers re-prescribe and re-dispense culprit drugs — without knowing those drugs previously caused harm.

This grant underscores the important work Dr. Hohl is doing as a DEM Innovation Initiative leader in this area to identify preventable adverse drug events in BC emergency departments.