The Clifford Craig Medical Research Trust on Wednesday announced $496,000 worth of research grants, awarded to recipients working to better Northern Tasmania’s health outcomes.
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The 11 diverse projects will research matter ranging from the potential benefits of injecting blood into knees to improve arthritis, to assessing whether patients should chew gum while fasting.
Clinical nurse Maria Unwin was inspired to analyse Emergency Department presentations after working as a nurse for more than 20 years.
“Working in [nursing] everyday and seeing the issues and seeing how long people are sometimes having to wait [inspired the research],” Ms Unwin said.
Her research has examined non-urgent ED presentations, and the circumstances surrounding them.
“The project going forward is going to look at their patient group and see what their needs actually are, and what services might already be available or maybe need to be available,” Ms Unwin said.
She will use her most recent grant, worth $24,210, to build on her research.
“Without that [grant] temptation from Clifford Craig and the University of Tasmania, I probably wouldn’t have made that step from clinical nursing to research,” Ms Unwin said.
Combining the grants with Clifford Craig’s existing research program will see the trust allocate more than $600,000 to Northern Tasmanian medical research in 2017.
Clifford Craig chief executive Peter Milne said the research program was designed to ensure Launceston General Hospital could be an exemplary regional hospital.
“We received over 25 applications this year … the research committee go through and grade them all, but there’s no specific area of need [we focus on],” Mr Milne said.
“[Grant recipients] are most appreciative, and most of [the recipients] here today … would not be able to undertake the research at all if it wasn’t for our funding and facilitation program.”
Clifford Craig medical research grant recipients 2017:
- Dr Jonathan Mulford
- Dr Marie Louise Bird
- Dave Jovic
- Dr Gregg Best
- Dr Sukhwinder Sohal
- Maria Unwin
- Dr Raj Eri
- Ianthe Boden
- Dr David Edis
- Dr Matt Brain