Like all Foundry centres, Foundry Vancouver-Granville is connected to their community. Folks at Foundry Vancouver-Granville see opportunities for research based on the needs of their community, but with limited resources it isn’t always possible to pursue these ideas.
Enter Sarah Adair. Sarah is a University of British Columbia research coordinator who is embedded at Foundry Vancouver-Granville. Originally, Sarah was supposed to coordinate two research projects at the centre but, given all the research ideas within the team, her role has expanded so that she now supports six different projects!
Sarah connects with community partners, conducts research activities, consults with staff and clinicians to develop their research ideas, facilitates research training for team members and so much more.
“My role is a mix of hands-on research support and consultation. More hands-on stuff is meant to mitigate some of those service provider coercion/privacy issues, by being someone who is not connected to clinical services, someone who is recruiting and helping with consent. In terms of consultation, more like “how to” stuff, answering questions about ethics applications or certain research skills. [I am] also liaising research between centres and with the central office, whether that’s transferring information or connecting service providers with people who can further their skills or do trainings.” – Sarah Adair, Research Coordinator embedded at Foundry Vancouver-Granville
The impacts of Sarah’s work include:
- Increased research capacity
- Relationship strengthening and further opportunities for reciprocity between Foundry Central Office and centres/communities
- Clinician, staff and leadership buy-in
- Supporting a culture of research
- Application of study tools and interventions across the Foundry network
- Mobilization of study findings in community, across the province and beyond.
Having research coordinators embedded at Foundry centres makes a significant difference to the folks who work at and access those centres.
“I think having community-led, service provider-led research projects is a lot more meaningful for the places these projects are born… Service providers are interested in research, but so limited in resources in terms of time, or staff, or money, so being able to support them is really important if we are going to continue doing quality improvement or innovation… There’s a lot of amazing work that can happen if we work with centres as a team.” – Sarah Adair, Research Coordinator embedded at Foundry Vancouver-Granville
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