As of March 31, 2022, nine of our 13 projects had completed recruitment, which is a major accomplishment. Most teams are currently collecting and analyzing data. We are excited to learn about and disseminate the findings from each project.

“The evidence generated by the 13 research teams in Phase 1 is leading to new discoveries and treatments and moving our field further ahead. I’m looking forward to Phase 2, where we will bring evidence-based interventions one step closer to changing the lives of children with brain-based developmental disabilities and their families.” – Steven Miller, CHILD-BRIGHT Scientific Co-Director and Research Program Co-Lead

The Research Program and Citizen Engagement Program co-supervised a summer student, Garima Saini, who conducted research related to equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization and Indigenization (EDI-DI) in our network. Garima's work served as useful background material for our new EDI-DI Program and CHILD-BRIGHT’s grant application to the SPOR Networks – Knowledge Mobilization and Implementation Science competition in December 2021.

Implementation science (IS) is a field of research that studies how evidence-based interventions will interact with “real-world” settings with the ultimate outcome of understanding what needs to be in place for the intervention to succeed in practice and at scale. For Phase 2, our primary goal is conducting IS research to promote the uptake of evidence generated from Phase 1, as well as evidence-based tools that were used in Phase 1, to improve health processes and outcomes for children with brain-based developmental disabilities and their families. 

We recognize that there are too few IS researchers who focus on implementing evidence to improve outcomes for children with brain-based developmental disabilities and their families.

By conducting our Phase 2 projects, we will build capacity at the intersection of these two fields in collaboration with the Training & Capacity Building Program.   

To prepare for this next phase of our network, our teams began brainstorming the design of their new research projects in August 2021. This evolved into larger, collaborative group discussions at our quarterly theme-wide meeting. Recognizing that CHILD-BRIGHT required more expertise in knowledge mobilization (KM) and IS to develop these projects, we recruited Janet Curran as our new IS Research Program Co-Lead. By the time we submitted our grant application to CIHR in December, we had developed 10 IS and one KM projects.

In addition to these 11 projects, we are very grateful to be collaborating with the Maternal Infant Child and Youth Research Network (MICYRN) to evaluate the implementation of patient-oriented research. We expect that findings from this work will inform child health research infrastructure needs across Canada.