2012 Research Awards
The Branch is pleased to announce the two residents awarded research grants to support travel related to research activities in surgical care in international health.
The Award Committee extends a special thank you to everyone who submitted proposals and encourages you to continue your global surgery-related work. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Canadian Network for International Surgery (CNIS) through a CIDA grant that enables us to provide these awards.
Congratulations to the award recipients! We look forward to presentations of their projects at future BIS rounds and other forums.
Meet the UBC residents who were awarded a Research Grant in 2012:
Sheona Mitchell – UBC Postgraduate Year 6, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology
Determining an optimal cervical cancer screening paradigm in a low-resource setting: A community-based randomized controlled trial comparing self-collected HPV testing with visual inspection and acetic acid (VIA) screening in Kampala, Uganda.
Field Mission – November 2013 – Uganda.
Faculty Supervisor: Gina Ogilvie, Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, UBC, Medical Director Clinical Prevention Services, BCCDC.
Research Proposal:
Cervical cancer, although almost entirely preventable through HPV vaccination and screening, remains the most common cause for cancer for women in Africa, because neither HPV vaccine nor screening are widely available due to cost and infrastructure constraints.
Research question: Can community-based self collected HPV DNA screening, as part of an integrated reproductive health program, reduce the prevalence of CIN 2+ 12 months after screening, compared to the current standard of care, visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) screening, in women aged 35-65, living in low-resource setting in Kampala, Uganda?
This study is a pilot randomized controlled trial serving the most vulnerable and at risk women for cervical cancer, specifically in Kampala, Uganda with the larger goal of providing evidence to inform health policy and in the process provide a sustainable screening program for under-serviced women.
Eiman Zargaran – UBC Postgraduate Year 4, Division of General Surgery
The distribution and social determinants of injury in Cape Town, South Africa: A prospective cohort study using an injury surveillance tool.
Field Mission – Fall 2013 – Cape Town, South Africa.
Faculty Supervisor: Dr. Morad Hameed, Assistant Professor of Surgery and Critical Care Medicine, Director, General Surgery Residency Program.
Research Proposal:This research project builds on previous support from the Branch for International Surgery that recently created and validated an injury surveillance tool, the electronic Trauma Health Record (eTHR). With past Branch funding, eTHR was successfully created, and gone through several iterations of redesign to ensure it is a highly usable clinical. In the past 18 months, eTHR has been tested in high and low resource, urban and remote setting, and been validated as a novel injury surveillance tool irrespective of low resource or environment. We are now ready to use this product in the high-volume, low-resource setting of Cape Town, South Africa, to provide this busy trauma center the ability for the first time to perform real-time prospective injury surveillance in an affordable and sustainable manner. This will be the first time any prospective injury data will be collected on the African continent to date.