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Since announcement of their appointments in the summer of 2021, two of the newest UCalgary Nursing postdoctoral fellows are making advances in their programs of research.

Dr. Catriona Hippman (PhD), who works with Dr. Dawn Kingston, The Lois Hole Hospital for Women Cross-Provincial Chair in Women’s Mental Health Research, has been hard at work recruiting patient partners.

“Patient partners bring their lived experience to support and inform the research,” Hippman explains, adding that they have had great success in their efforts. “People are expressing interest across BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan. We have heard time and again from these individuals that ‘it would be a dream come true’ to contribute to this work and that speaks to the importance of health systems transformation for families experiencing acute postpartum mental illness.

“Over the coming months, we will be working with our patient partners to refine our research questions and launch recruitment for our study seeking to describe the lived experience of hospitalization for acute postpartum mental illness in Western Canada.”

Aligning care with the needs and concerns of older Albertans with cancer and their families is the core work of Dr. Fay Strohschein’s (RN, PhD) fellowship. “So far the work has focused on facilitating engagement with older adults, their caregivers and health providers involved in that care to inform the Cancer SCN’s Alberta Cancer Diagnosis (ACD) program,” she says. This work has been accepted for presentation at two upcoming international conferences and Strohschein also collaborated to compile a written protocol for the ACD initiative, a central document describing the ACD approach and methods.

She is also supporting work to articulate the novel approach taken to promote innovation within the ACD program which is forging new ground in health system improvement. And, in the final year of her fellowship, Strohschein will establish the groundwork for a clinical care pathway for older adults with cancer. This pathway, informed by best practices in geriatric oncology and age-analysis of patient-reported outcome and experience measures, may be integrated with current tumour site pathways to address age-related needs and concerns that impact cancer treatment and outcomes.

Dr. Nicole Letourneau also has postdoctoral fellows on her team: Drs Lubna Anis and Sarah Moore.