Research in CTS (formerly CROW) Meeting: February 8, 2024

 

Present:   Emily Houston, Jerry Landau, Ben Littenberg, Charlie MacLean, Gail Rose, Connie van Eeghen (6)

1.                   Warm Up:

a.       Warm days ahead already!

2.                   Group discussion on how to find funding

a.       Emily’s favorite funding searches for graduate students

                                                   i.      Pivot.proquest.com: create an account, save searches, save options that are interesting. Gail has used it to create a profile that will send options every week, but much is not relevant. Nancy knows it taps into foundation funding and smaller opportunities to support dissertation work.  

                                                 ii.      Grants.gov for NIH opps

                                               iii.      Candid.org includes Gates Foundation and other private foundations

b.       Weekly NIH TOC listserve

                                                   i.      Also NIH RePORTER to see what has been funded in the past

                                                 ii.      ClinicalTrials.gov

c.       Internal UVM Office of Research listserve

                                                   i.      Their website indicates the number of grants they’ve helped support

d.       Emily received an investigator initiated award through private company

e.       Charlie: available awards through https://www.med.uvm.edu/nne-ctr/funding/PPP .  Charlie and Connie have one currently ongoing.  One award each year must go to a PBRN based study for primary care practice based research. This is funded through MaineHealth (no medical site but site for Tufts, partner with U Southern Maine, have a research institute).  Dartmouth has applied for a full CTSA to conduct additional work. It really helps to have relationships across institutions to build partnerships in developing grant ideas. Rural partners are an asset.

f.        Nancy: found collaborator for NCI grant through lit search and cold call. Targeted Louisiana because needed racial diversity; reviewer comment came back to focus on racial diversity in New England.

g.       Charlie: NNE CTR PBRN is in a system of PBRNs that can help recruit from more diverse, and therefore more generalizable, parts of the country.

h.       Emily: any collaboration outside the country, such as McGill.  Charlie: study on “pre-habilitation” to do rehabilitation work before surgery; resulted in a Grand Rounds talk.  Also worked on de-prescribing: helpful but not resulting in funding, as funders differ widely in methods of funding that don’t apply across international boundaries. This allows researchers to pivot quickly; our system takes a long time to operate. Ben: K awards are like that, but don’t cover lab and other research expenses.

i.         Jerry: goal is to start small smaller projects. Will follow up on the suggestions above.

j.         Ben: two strategies

                                                   i.      Find opportunities that the funder is promoting

                                                 ii.      Create own proposal and find a funder

                                               iii.      Lesson: don’t spend all your time on pleasing the funder

k.       Emily: her dissertation has had funding and, although taking longer than planned, is getting to the end.  Her section has continuous funding and allows for some independent work.

3.                   Next meeting: Feb 15 2024, topic TBD

Recorded by: CvE

Research in CTS (formerly CROW) Meeting: January 25, 2024

 

Present:   Juvena Hitt, Amanda Kennedy, Ben Littenberg, Liliane Savard, Connie van Eeghen (5)

 1.                   Warm Up:

a.       Amanda: How to revitalize CROW – make mandatory for research students

b.       Ben attended NNE CTR webinar on Team Science, with some strategies:

                                                   i.      Restate the group’s values

                                                 ii.      Restate the research question

                                               iii.      Attempts at communication, such as weekly newsletter

c.       Connie: interest in reviving past IBH-PC qualitative study related to Team Science

2.                   Bedard, What Would It Mean for Scientists to Listen to Patients, New Yorker 2024

a.       Amazing that you can make news by being respectful to patients

b.       How do you start to revise the culture of medical care to support better relationships

                                                   i.      Why are doctors bad at this? Well, car mechanics and lawyers are too

c.       IBH-PC measured empathy and patient-centeredness; positive association with high integration

                                                   i.      Dan Mullin: 1) PCPs with colocated BH providers are more likely to explore, acknowledge, and encourage patient disclosure of emotionally charged content when they are confident of their ability to connect a patient to a 1-1 encounter with a BH provider should more complex needs arise.  

                                                 ii.      2) When BH providers practice collaboratively with PCPs there are opportunities for BH providers to model verbal and non-verbal behaviors that communicate empathy.  This modeling and learning may help PCPs to strength their ability to respond empathically when they are confronted with a challenging patient encounter.  

                                               iii.      3) Collaborative, inter-professional practice necessarily expands the range of biopsychosocial concerns that both BH and medical providers are aware of.  When a BH provider practices alongside a PCP they gain greater appreciation for the impact of medical concerns on psychosocial wellbeing.  Likewise, when a medical provider provides care of patients in collaboration with a BH provider the PCP gains a greater understanding of the impact of psychosocial phenomena (trauma, addiction, grief, depression) on medical conditions and the treatment of medical conditions.

d.       All PCPs want to do a good job but EBP is like an onion: the  more you peel back, the more you cry and the  more it stinks

                                                   i.      Listening to patients is a known EBP

e.       Excerpt: “Last year, investigators from the RECOVER Initiative, a government-sponsored Long COVID research effort, proposed a carefully modelled framework that identified twelve symptoms frequently associated with the disease. They published their results in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in an article filled with caveats about how this work was only the first step toward deriving a more precise Long COVID definition. But some Long COVID patient-advocacy groups swiftly denounced the study, lamenting that the framework’s scoring cutoff would leave thousands of sick people without a diagnosis. One such group called the RECOVER criteria “regressive and blunt.” More than forty-two thousand people have sent letters to the N.I.H. demanding that it retract the study and its scoring system.”

                                                   i.      How to deal with this?

1.       Create a new term

2.       Provide different categories of Long Covid, one of which includes the criteria

                                                 ii.      Why didn’t RECOVER figure this out ahead of time?

1.       Knew that they were leaving people out

2.       Either didn’t know the pushback and/or wanted to define the entity for their own purposes

                                               iii.      Juvena was a participate in RECOVER, involving an antibody test

f.        Turning a symptom/syndrome into a diagnosis is an essential step to treatment; doing that well is the difference of benefit and harm

                                                   i.      How to turn gaslighting into validation/confirmation of patient experience

3.                   Next meeting: Feb 1 2024, topic TBD

Recorded by: CvE