We are pleased to announce the two winning teams of our 2020 CHILD-BRIGHT KT Innovation Incubator competition: the WeeWheel team and the Perspectives of Mental Health team. Read more about each team below.
What is WeeWheel?
The WeeWheel team will use the KT Innovation Incubator grant to address the evidence-practice gap in wheelchair skills training among pediatric manual wheelchair users at the Marie Enfant Rehabilitation Centre (CRME) and two affiliated specialized schools: École Joseph-Charbonneau (ÉJC) and École Victor-Doré (ÉVD).
More specifically, the team will:
Develop and adapt Wheelchair Skills Training Program (WSTP) educational resources for children, for example, through the creation of a training workbook, instructional posters, and a storybook. These resources will be complementary to one another, for example, by using the same characters. They will be engaging and geared to the needs and preferences of the children who use them.
Share these resources, most particularly with local ‘knowledge users’ which in this case are the occupational therapists at all three sites and the wheelchair users they work with.
The main messages that are communicated are:
Paediatric wheelchair users can learn new wheelchair skills
Wheelchair training using the new educational resources can be both effective and fun for children
By developing and sharing these resources, the team aims to generate awareness and interest in the training program, share knowledge with a broader range of people, and facilitate practice change in order to inform future efforts to implement the training program in appropriate settings.
Meet the team:
The WeeWheel project is led by Paula Rushton (Associate Professor, Université de Montréal), Krista Best (Assistant Professor, Université Laval), Lee Kirby (Physiatrist and Professor, Dalhousie University) and François Routhier (Associate Professor, Université Laval).
The team also includes:
Decision-maker and knowledge users Claude Nadeau (Manager of the Seating and Mobility Program at CRME) and Dominique Héroux (Manager of School-Based Rehabilitation at the specialized schools affiliated with CRME);
Practitioner and knowledge users Cindy Rice (Occupational Therapist and Clinical Coordinator of the Seating and Mobility Program at CRME) and Tatiana Dib (Occupational Therapist at CRME and WSTP expert);
A Knowledge Translation expert, Melanie Barwick (Senior Scientist, SickKids Research Institute and Professor, University of Toronto) and an expert in pediatric rehabilitation and wheelchair user, Maxime Robert, (Assistant Professor, Université Laval). The team will also integrate four professional master’s students of occupational therapy: Emma Lafleur, Andrée-Anne Côté, Laurence Fortin-Haines and Isabelle Paré, for whom this project will serve as their research project requirement for their occupational therapy degree.
What is the Perspectives of Mental Health project?
The Perspectives of Mental Health team will use the KT Innovation Incubator grant to include the voices of youth with neurodevelopmental disorders in mental health discussions and to create strategies and materials that can facilitate more dialogue between youth and healthcare providers.
More specifically, the team will:
Work with youth with neurodevelopmental disorders to create digital stories to share their thoughts on how they would like healthcare providers to talk to them about their mental health. Digital stories will be shared with researchers and healthcare providers across, and beyond the POND Network.
Evaluate the impact of these stories.
This project aims to develop a KT product that includes youth voices from a range of neurodevelopmental disorders including youth with autism, ADHD, OCD, and intellectual disability, which has the potential for short-term and long-term impact. Including youth with neurodevelopmental disorders in the design of resources for healthcare providers moves this project beyond traditional KT efforts often led by healthcare providers to inform youth. The digital stories created by youth with neurodevelopmental disorders will feature voices that have not always been included in research, and for that reason, have a better chance of changing healthcare practice. This study will also develop insights on how digital storytelling can potentially be used as a novel KT tool among youth with neurodevelopmental disorders. Building on the team’s previous experience using digital storytelling, this project has the potential of also making an innovative methodological contribution to the field of qualitative methodology.
Meet the team here:
The Perspectives of Mental Health project is led by Patrick Jachyra (post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health), Yona Lunsky (psychologist and member of the POND Network which is a research network focused on improving care and long-term outcomes for children with neurodevelopmental disorders), Windemere Jarvis (knowledge broker for POND), Cathy Gaboury (parent and POND participant advisors), Sheldon Gaboury (youth and POND participant advisors), Noah Barnett (Director of the POND Youth Council and POND participant advisors), Austin Cosgrove (youth and POND participant advisors), Claudine Evangelista (parent, teacher, librarian, and POND participant advisors), Evdokia Anagnostou (Principal Investigator of the POND Network and pediatric neurologist).
Congratulations to both winning teams!
We would also like to thank all the applicants of our third CHILD-BRIGHT KT Innovation Incubator grant competition as well as our review panel, which was composed of parents, researchers, clinicians, educators, trainees, and youth with expertise in KT research, childhood disability research, occupational therapy, mental health services, communications, and advocacy.