Dear OHHRRN Scientists and Affiliates:
This is my first message to you as the Scientific Director in the OHHRRN Newsletter. I felt it was the appropriate time to address you as a group to 1) bring you up to date on the activities that we have undertaken that build on OHHRRN, and 2) to let you know of the various services we can offer to members and affiliates to enable more and better health human resources research in the province.
You will see in this newsletter that we are pleased to announce the establishment of the pan Canadian Health Human Resources Network with development funds from Health Canada. This network will enable us to expand beyond Ontario to connect and coordinate HHR research happening across Canada. One of our first activities will be compiling a searchable and downloadable bibliography of HHR publications from our new website. We would be pleased to incorporate all OHHRRN Scientist and Affiliates’ materials and bibliographies in this important online resource. We will also be holding a series of three regional consultations – the first of which will be in Halifax; subsequent events will be in Vancouver and Ottawa (stay tuned).
We are also showcasing in this newsletter research for which our affiliates have received research funds that OHHRRN has officially supported. We would like to let all of our OHHRRN Scientists and Affiliates know that we are pleased to provide letters of support for upcoming research proposals – from the CIHR Meeting, Planning and Dissemination grants, the Open Operating Grants and the Partnership for Health System Improvement grants and beyond. One of the upcoming competitions we wanted to bring to your attention was in regards to the Community-Based Primary Health Care initiative (see pgs 4-5). The letters of support we provide not only outline the resources that OHHRRN membership enables the research team, it also highlights the in-kind support we can offer – which includes access to our CHNET-Works! webinar platform (which can be used for research team meetings and not just dissemination) and our Working Paper Series and Bilingual Plain Language Summaries. Some if the recent OHHRRN-related webinars and working papers are highlighted in this newsletter.
In closing, I welcome all OHHRRN Scientists and Affiliates to let us know how we can better serve your needs in enabling more and better health human resources research and effective knowledge exchange. If you have not signed up as a member as of yet, we welcome you to do so.
Ivy Lynn Bourgeault
This initiative has been generously funded by a grant from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The views expressed [here] do not necessarily reflect those of the ministry.