Prestige, Needed Research as Akron Children’s Receives NIH Grant
AKRON, Ohio (News Talk 1480 WHBC) – Currently, nearly two-million children in the U.S. have life-limiting disabilities or illnesses.
For them, quality-of-life palliative care while at home is so important.
Akron Children’s Hospital has been awarded a three-year $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
They’ll be using the funds to define better-quality at-home palliative care for children, teens and young adults.
Currently such care is based on adults standards that are also pre-COVID.
Here’s more from the hospital’s news release:
Dr. Daniel Grossoehme, a senior scientist in Akron Children’s Rebecca D. Considine Research Institute, will be the principal investigator.
“Dr. Grossoehme’s work with Dr. Sarah Friebert is innovative, insightful and game-changing,” said Dr. Michael Forbes, chief academic officer at Akron Children’s. “This type of research grant – the R01 – from the NIH is considered one of the highest in academia, awarded to less than 20 percent of the applicants. As a result, this work is considered the ‘best of the best.’”
According to Dr. Grossoehme, most of the current standards for care for home-based pediatric hospice and palliative care were derived from adult hospice and palliative care, and generally represent the perspectives of parents and providers from data which pre-dates the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There is an urgent need to better understand the experiences of the children and teens receiving this care,” said Dr. Grossoehme. “Our central hypothesis is that pediatric patients have perspectives and words to describe important aspects of their care that differ from those of their providers and caregivers.”
