MORE than $110,000 has been donated to health researchers in the region by the Far North Queensland Hospital Foundation, raising the Foundation’s charitable grants to more than $250,000 in the last two years.
Research into curing arthritis, optimising the care of people with hepatitis B and assisting in the nutrition of First People pregnant women are just a few of the numerous grants supported by the Foundation in 2021 and 2022.
Since 2007 the Foundation has committed close to $1.5 million to increase research capacity within the Far North
“The grants play a vital role in helping researchers deliver the best health care services for Far North Queenslanders,” Foundation chairman Dr Ken Chapman said. “The Foundation is proud to support these important annual grants.”
The largest 2022 grant of $43,630 will go towards curing arthritis using novel compounds from jellyfish venom.
“This research aims to determine if a specific fraction of the venom from the box jellyfish Chironex fleckeri relieves the symptoms in induced rheumatoid arthritic mice,” JCU Professor Jamie Seymour said. “This is by either decreasing the severity of the damage in joints of mice, curing the disease or decreasing the pain associated with the disease but not decreasing the underlying disease.”
Dietitian Melissa Kilburn received $25,000 to further research the ADAPTTS app-based diet and physical activity tools for the Torres Strait.
“The aim of the tools is to enable point-of-care lifestyle behaviour feedback within community primary health care centres and to also gain a deep understanding of local lifestyle habits and the determinants of those behaviours in the Torres Strait which is currently lacking,” she said.
Tileah Drahm-Butler, a senior social worker at Cairns Hospital, will use her $10, 000 Paul and Dina Kamsler Memorial Grant, sponsored by the Kamsler Brothers, to research the transformation to a culturally safe Emergency Department for First Nations people.
Her research is in the building phase and will support the nurturing of important relationships between grass roots community and the front line workforce during this time.
“This Foundation grant will support the continuance of collective gatherings between grass-roots community, a front-line Emergency Department and community workforce,” she said. “Through these gatherings, relationships will be nurtured and grown to be central in the participatory action research which aims to continue the work of enhancing cultural safety in the Cairns Emergency Department led by First Nations people.”
In 2021, the Foundation’s largest grant of $50, 000 was awarded to Dr Josh Hanson to examine the demographic characteristics of people living with hepatitis B in FNQ, their other health conditions and the strain of the virus that they carry to help improve their optimal care.
He said chronic hepatitis B in FNQ is one of the highest in Australia, making it important to identify and treat people who have it as up to 30 per cent of them will die if their condition is untreated.
Sarah Russell’s $25, 000 grant, jointly provided by the Foundation and Hot North, will be used to develop culturally appropriate mental health assessment tools for older adults living in the Torres Strait.
The Paul and Dina Kamsler Memorial Grant of $10, 000 was given to Dr Janelle James-McAlpine to examine nutrition, its determinants and associations with birth outcomes in pregnant First People of FNQ. It will also be used to identify those at risk of nutrition-related adverse effects and develop health strategies to mitigate their risk.
This co-designed project partners with Mookai Rosie Bi-Bayan and pregnant FNQ First Nationsof women to describe their nutrition status and decision-making, creating an evidence-based foundation on which to design and develop primary health strategies. The project also aims to develop an Aboriginal research team at Mookai Rosie, improving health literacy, awareness, nutritional assessment, surveillance and perinatal outcomes in women using their services.
Other 2022 research projects funded by the Foundation include:
• $8012 to discover if leaving an untreated box jellyfish tentacle on a victim increases the amount of venom delivered
• $5000 for allocations of authority and patients’, GPs’ and specialists’ decision making in health care settings, evidence from FNQ
• $5000 for the EQUIP trial, advocating for mental health with a passion for digital transformation of health care
• $5000 for the development of a Far North Queensland virtual fracture clinic
• $5000 towards reshaping microbiota extracellular vesicles to combat inflammatory disease
• $5000 to further study biodiscovery from Wet Tropics native plants.
Other 2021 research projects that received Foundation grants are:
• $5000 for developing a best practice model of psychosocial care for young people living with cancer in regional, rural and remote areas
• $5000 to streamline rehabilitation post total hip replacement surgery
• $5000 to build a mental health database combining demographic, household economic, geographic and pharmaceutical information on 1000 unique emergency mental health related admissions at hospitals and health services in Cairns, Townsville, Mount Isa and Atherton
• $5000 to introduce a biostatistics, epidemiology and research design support model into research education and development activities via the CHHHS Clinical Research Unit
• $5000 to harness the power of CD8+ Memory T Cells in the Airway Mucosa for long-lasting protection against pulmonary tuberculosis
• $5000 to test a neuronal-immune model to see how systems contribute to the systemic pathophysiology of human envenomation by Chironex fleckeri, the lethal box jellyfish
• $5000 to profile abdominal tuberculosis in FNQ to promote earlier diagnosis and reduce the need for morbid surgical intervention
• $5000 for interviewing current Year 4 medical students to assess how they learn, encouraging the development of self-regulated learning to lead to an improvement in the quality and retention of the FNQ workforce
• $5000 towards documenting and studying the largely untapped pharmacopoeia of Atherton’s Mbabaram Aboriginal people and discovering viable medicinal plant candidates for anti-inflammatory screening
• $5000 for a randomised clinical trial of current assessment practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples with delirium
• $5000 to use magnification and fluorescent microscopy to determine the nature of a previously undiscovered type of nematocyst found in Irukandji jellyfish
• $5000 for nursing and midwifery research capacity and culture in FNQ
• $5000 to evaluate the feasibility and clinical effectiveness of Real-time At home Care for Home (REACH) dialysis with the potential to increase home dialysis uptake