EDMONTON — “What do I do if my child has COVID-19?” “What should I know about vaccinating them against the virus?” “How do I ease my kids back into in-person activities?”
Two University of Alberta researchers want to help parents navigate questions like those, with six newly developed and easy-to-understand tools aimed to provide reliable information.
The three videos and three interactive infographics were created by pediatrics professor Lisa Hartling, director of the Alberta Research Centre for Health Evidence, and nursing professor Shannon Scott, principal investigator for the research program Translating Evidence in Child Health to Enhance Outcomes, or ECHO.
The tools are available through the ECHO website as well as Translating Emergency Knowledge for Kids, which is co-directed by Hartling and Scott.
Hartling and Scott have worked together since 2005 on similar tools – like this one for croup. The process includes a parent advisory group that provides input and feedback. The pair went even further to develop the new tools for COVID-19, by interviewing more than two dozen parents and running focus groups in order to better understand parents’ concerns.
“One of the challenges this time around has been that the science (around COVID-19) is evolving, and I think parents’ concerns are evolving, too,” says Hartling.
In addition to being online, the tools are also screened in emergency departments and walk-in clinics.
“There are 383 sites in Alberta, through Alberta Health Services, that routinely show our tools at least once per hour,” says Scott. “Through those venues we get exposure to over 940,000 viewers a month.”
Scott feels the timing for the release of the COVID tools is perfect, as the pandemic nears the end of its third year, and hospital wait times and health-care staff are stretched to their limits.
Hartling and Scott are both members of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute and Stollery Science Lab Distinguished Researchers. They received a $272,000 grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for the creation of the tools. Their research has also been funded by the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation through WCHRI, including five-year funding for the parent advisory group.
More information is here. To speak with Lisa Hartling or Shannon Scott, please contact:
Sarah Vernon | University of Alberta communications associate | svernon@ualberta.ca