Projects

Based on community-identified needs, the Kwiis-hen-niip project aims to improve emergency care through enhanced support for first responders, community readiness, patient transport and communications in remote first nation communities.  It’s a collaboration between the Nuu Chah Nulth Tribal Council, BC Emergency Medicine Network, UBC Department of Emergency Medicine, BC Emergency Health Services, the First Nations Health Authority, Island Health, Heart & Stroke, Telus, the Justice Institute of British Columbia, and four Nuu-chah-nulth nations. The research project is a four-year partnership funded by Canadian Institutes Health Research.

The FRONTIER Trial – Field Randomization of NA-1 Treatment In Early Responders – is a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, single dose study initiated prehospital in the ambulance to evaluate the effectiveness of NA-1 to slow or halt the damaging affects of stroke. The study is a collaboration of NoNO Inc., St. Michaels Hospital; Canadian Stroke Network; Genome BC; Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health; University of British Columbia.

The EpiDose randomized controlled trial seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of a low cumulative dose of epinephrine compared to a standard cumulative dose of epinephrine during resuscitation from ventricular fibrillation (VF) or ventricular tachycardia (VT) in adult out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients. The trial is based out of the University of Toronto, with BC as a study site, managed in partnership between BC Emergency Health Services and BC RESURECT.

A cohort study, funded by the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, enrolling Canadian paramedics from BC to Ontario. The study is designed to evaluate infection-induced SARS-Cov-2 seroprevalence and occupational risks of paramedics in Canada, as well as investigating differences in immunogenicity between vaccine strategies. CORSIP participants complete health and occupational questionnaires, as well as provide blood samples over a 1-year period.

Opioid overdose has become an increasingly common cause of death in our communities. This projects seeks to identify the optimal treatment strategies for opioid-related cardiac arrest. With funding from Canadian Institutes Health Research, the investigation is collecting opioid-specific data from clinical records, and will link to provincial administrative datasets, including patient-level coroner investigations to provide a gold-standard definition for opioid-related deaths.

Building effective and accurate sensors that can recognize the loss of circulation and then automatically notify a dispatch center of the location of the SCA patient will ensure that each SCA is “witnessed” immediately at the time of the collapse. Such sensors could increase the chance of survival in the current treated but “unwitnessed” group from 4%-16%. Sensors will also double the number of patients treatable by paramedics (rather than declaring futility due to lengthy intervals between collapse and discovery). Widespread use of biosensors would increase the number of cardiac arrest survivors nationally from 1,800 to 6,000 per year.