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Committees

Training

Chair: David Johnson (University. of Calgary). Members: M. Bhatt, E. Bujold, R. Brant, R. Correll, A. Majnemar, N. Rosenblum, S. Ross, S. Turvey

MICYRN established a Training Core in response to a national consensus that clinical research in maternal and child health is severely limited by a deficit in the number and type of individuals needed to perform clinical research and by the absence of a national comprehensive training strategy. Subsequently the Training Core developed a consensus document detailing the range of professional roles that comprise a successful clinical research team and the composite skills required of each of these professionals in addition to a comprehensive survey of existing training resources offered by academic centres, CIHR-funded research teams, and CIHR Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research (STIHR) programs. This survey demonstrated training gaps in several key areas therefore the Training Core will address these gaps in national maternal and child clinical research training by creating four new programs. These programs will share resources with existing STIHR programs such as CCHCSP and with networks such as CON and CHILD.

  1. A training salary support program for 50/50 clinician scientists will be modeled after CCHCSP, which supports clinician scientists who focus exclusively or predominately on research.
  2. A new program will allow basic scientists, methodologists, or ethicists wanting to work closely with a clinical research team focusing on maternal and child health problems to apply for a one year award thereby allowing the trainee to subsequently focus their career on translational research. The clinical research team must be multi-disciplinary, well established, and cross two CIHR Pillars. Applicants must also have a well-formulated plan for addressing a basic science, methodological, or bioethical problem whose solution would have direct clinical relevance.
  3. Limited funds are currently available to emerging teams of clinician scientists to meet to address complex methodological problems, explore and solidify their common interests, or develop cohesive research strategies therefore MICYRN will make available symposia funding for emerging research teams. Applications will be sought from groups of researchers wishing to address important maternal or child health problems in novel ways. Priority will be given to groups focusing on complex health care problems with the intent of developing multi-centre approaches.
  4. Establishment of a National Study Coordinator Network (NSCN) and Training Resource Repository (TRR) to address the lack of maternal and child health centres that currently do not have centralized programs for identifying, training, and mentoring research coordinators. A national coordinating centre will be created with the intent of forming a network of highly trained and experienced research coordinators at each MICYRN site, the development of a web-based repository of existing resources for training research assistants and coordinators, and the establishment of standards for conducting MICYRN multi-centre studies.

    5. MICYRN Research Coordinator Environmental Scan, 2009: A report on current roles of research coordinators in the maternal and pediatric research fields and their unique training needs