Pediatric patients and their family members know what's important to them. Instead of researchers and healthcare professionals deciding what research is important to kids and their families, those kids and their families should be the ones deciding.
Elise Kammerer & Calveen Basi
Co-founders,
Children's HEART
Where did this idea come from?
With the support of some great mentors, Elise began collaborating with patient and family partners in 2019. Over the years, she became increasingly unhappy with the status quo of engaging kids and their families as a "check box" in research. Patient-oriented research just isn't good enough anymore. We need to be conducting patient-driven research.
Elise and Calveen met in 2022 when they started working together for the Canadian national knowledge mobilization network, Solutions for Kids in Pain. They clicked, began idea-generating and collaborating, and haven't looked back.
That's where our idea for Children's HEART came from. We need to collaborate with patient and family partners at all stages of the research process, and our partners need to be equal decisionmakers in our research.
It's time to do things differently, and we're so excited to be working with so many dedicated partners to make children's healthcare experiences better.
Children's HEART: Healing Advocates Research for Tomorrow