Research at Shriners Hospitals for Children Canada

The vision of the Research Center from the get-go has always been, it's not enough to just treat the disease. We need to understand what's behind the disease, and intervene in the most targeted way.

I think that the parents and the children benefit from the vision the Research Center was created with. What I like to say is the research of today represents the cures of tomorrow.

So Shriners Hospitals for Children Canada has specifically been dedicated to pediatric research, to make sure that we are focusing on what is important to children and young adults, and that we're able to take the research that's out there and apply it to what is important to their lives. For example, we've been a part of Solutions for Kids in Pain, which is a national nationwide strategy to help with pain management, and that we look at decreasing pain, anxiety, the whole potentially negative connotation that can come with having a procedural intervention. And we make sure that we're involved in cutting edge research so that our pediatric patients don't have to experience a discomfort when they come to us.

What research really brings is over time it will allow us to pinpoint better the treatment, because if we understand that some patient does not react well to some treatment, we might suggest new ones so that those patients can also benefit from a surgical treatment.

Research is really critical to the quality of our care, because through research you can learn what works and what doesn't work. And then to find ways that are better, that improve the quality of life of the children, of their parents. Research really challenges the status quo. So we can't be satisfied with the way we're doing things, but rather we must always strive for excellence and to change the way we're doing things if it means improving the services that are provided to the children we see and their families.

What we are doing now in particular is genetic testing, because the genetic field has exploded over the past 10 years. There is more techniques, they are getting cheaper, more accessible. So we can offer now genetic testing to basically all our patients where we expect to find any genetic cause of their condition. And that is also exciting, because you try to find what causes the problem in each patient.

Here at Shriners, we have children with OI of all the different types who come to us from different parts of Canada, the US, but also from around the world, who have come from at least 60 different countries. So we benefit from having all these rich types of children with OI that allows us then to quickly catalyze our efforts to make sure that the research that we're doing can make a global impact.

The support we get from Shriners through the peer-reviewed grant system allows us to do more research, and to go further in our knowledge on how to help the kids that we see every day.

[Hopitaux Shriners por enfants®; Shriners Hospitals for Children® Canada]