Every year, CHILD-BRIGHT helps train the next cohort of students in patient-oriented research by enabling our project and program teams to hire trainees for the summer. Students become active members of the research team and explore the concept of patient engagement within the research process. The studentship experience lasts between 12 and 16 weeks, but if former CHILD-BRIGHT summer student Liel Cohn is any indication, the benefits of the learning experience extend well beyond those summer months.
Liel is the first former CHILD-BRIGHT summer student to be published as the lead author in a journal. Her new systematic review “Health Outcomes of Parents of Children with Chronic Illness: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” was published on Jan. 6 in the Journal of Pediatrics. It finds that parents of chronically ill children experience poorer health outcomes than parents of unaffected children. This would in turn demonstrate a need to screen parents for mood and anxiety disorders, in particular, and develop and put into place targeted interventions to better support caregiver wellbeing.
The research process that culminated in the literature review began in 2017, when Liel was an undergraduate studying life sciences at McMaster University. In the summer of that year, she undertook a studentship at SickKids with Dr. Eyal Cohen, who is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the review in addition to being a PI with the CHILD-BRIGHT Coached, Coordinated, Enhanced Neonatal Transition (CCENT) project.
"I really had little to no research background [prior to beginning the studentship],” Liel explained to us following the paper's publication in January. "I really was learning everything from the ground up."
The studentship offered her the hands-on opportunity to begin combing through the literature on the health outcomes of caregivers, yielding some unexpected results along the way. "I was honestly surprised to see that the vast majority of the papers [reviewed] reported negative outcomes for these parents, especially higher rates of anxiety and depression," she told us. Just as surprising was the lack of data on caregivers' physical health and on the health of fathers. For example, only one of the 26 papers that met the inclusion criteria for the review focused on physical health outcomes of caregivers. She hopes interest in the review will spur interest in learning more about these two topics, in addition to raising awareness about the struggles these caregivers may face—and encouraging institutions to build up their capacity to recognize and alleviate these challenges.
Since 2017, Liel has moved to Israel and is completing her final semester of a life sciences and biology degree with a minor in cognition at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She intends to apply to medical school with the hope of pursuing pediatrics.
That doesn't mean she has left her CHILD-BRIGHT experience behind, however. Her time as a summer student continues to resonate, as the lessons learned about patient-oriented research are ones she will take with her as she trains her sights on practicing medicine: "CHILD-BRIGHT gives a different outlook on how to look at research. It really brings people together to think about how we can together as researchers, given our different values, opinions, and backgrounds, build a more patient-oriented research mindset."
"I definitely plan on bringing that with me and hopefully improve the research field, as much as I can in that regard, and patient experience.”
Are you a former CHILD-BRIGHT summer student? We want to hear from you! Let us know what you've been up to by writing to: communications@child-bright.ca.