Machelle Wilchesky, Director of the Donald Berman Maimonides Centre for Research in Aging, Assistant Professor for the Department of Family Medicine and Division of Geriatric Medicine at McGill University, and a scientist at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology of the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research (Jewish General Hospital), receives two prestigious grants: one from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the other from the McGill Innovation and Partnerships Program. Professor Wilchesky’s research program focuses on improving the primary (medical and nursing) care received by frail elderly people with dementia residing in long-term care facilities.
CIHR Project Grant
Professor Wilchesky wins a CIHR grant for her project entitled Piloting the Elder Abuse Suspicion Index – long-term care (EASI-ltc)©: A Mixed Methods implementation Feasibility Study. In 2019, Professor Wilchesky’s team published the EASI-ltc©, the first comprehensive tool that addresses all elder abuse domains for the long-term care (LTC) setting. This new project grant will support study implementation within seven LTC and two intermediary care homes, and will:
1. Establish preliminary validity of the EASI-ltc tool in identifying cases of abuse; and
2. Determine the feasibility (including acceptability, demand, barriers, and facilitators) of implementation from the viewpoints of LTC staff, residents, and their families.
Mark Yaffe, Tenured Professor within the Department Family Medicine, who developed the original EASI© tool for use by family doctors in their offices, is co-investigator on this project.
McGill Innovation and Partnerships Program Grant
LTC is an under‐resourced primary care health care sector and, while technologies that can support our limited LTC clinical staff exist in theory, they have neither been tested nor have they been tailored for use in this setting. Professor Wilchesky’s grant from the McGill Innovation and Partnerships Program aims to address this. Her project is entitled Remote vital signs tracking using wearable sensor technology in the long‐term care setting: The Maimonides VitalTracer Co‐Creation & Implementation Pilot. In collaboration with OROT (the connected health innovation hub of the Jewish General Hospital), this project will:
1. Co‐create a clinical platform tailored for use by LTC clinical staff;
2. Determine the feasibility of implementation; and
3. Evaluate the validity of this technology to accurately provide remote vital signs data in this frail patient population.
Mark Karanofsky and Vladmir Khanassov, both members of the Department Family Medicine, are co-investigators on this project.
Congratulations!