A research project led by two members of St. Lawrence College (SLC)’s nursing faculty has been granted $350,000 in federal funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through their College and Community Social Innovation Fund (CCSIF).
The research led by Fiona Jager and Melissa Johnston, both instructors of SLC’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing program, is one of 57 projects selected from a pool of 147 applications led by workers in the college sector, with the program focusing on partnerships between applied research and community agencies.
Dr. Sam Boyle of Queensland University of Technology and Dr. Jean-Laurent Domingue of the University of Ottawa are also involved in the grant.
The SLC led project will receive funding for three years in an effort to improve support for family members who make mental health care decisions on behalf of loved ones.
Fiona Jager told YGK News that the idea for the project grew from a study in 2024 which looked closely into community treatment orders (CTOs), with the intent, and challenge, being in finding a consensus between the range of professions involved in CTOs on what areas they can most be improved.
She said that previous conversations around CTOs revealed extremely different priorities for depending on the position that was surveyed, but that support for caregivers was an area where everyone saw room for improvement – including the community partners the team had been working alongside.
“A lot of the conversations we had been exposed to about how to make the CTO better seemed to be like 2 contrasting perspectives, doctors think this, lawyers think this,” Jager said.
“So we wanted to see where is there agreement… we went back to our community partners and we showed them all of the areas where we thought there was agreement and we could make changes, but it was specifically the area of substitute decision makers that they said, that’s something that we would really see the use for on the ground for us, for our teams, for the families we work with.”
A substitute decision maker is the person, generally a family member, who is legally responsible for making personal, health care, and financial decisions for someone who is mentally incapable of making those decisions on their own behalf.
Jager says that up to this point, the supports available to aid decision makers have been lacking and in general it is a research area that is largely untouched.
She said the team has located a related study from the UK which, much like this team, is working towards building resources for substitute decision makers, but overall CTOs around the world have remained basically unchanged since being introduced in the early 2000s.
The context around CTOs, she says, has not been adjusted to account for changing times.
“One of the things we did notice in our prior research is the context in which they’re used is changing,the amount of community treatment that’s available for people, it’s less now than it was previously,” Jager said.
“There’s higher numbers of people on CTOs that don’t have access to assertive community treatment. And there’s also other issues that clients are experiencing, such as homelessness and addiction at a level that they weren’t experiencing.”
The researchers say family members and caregivers don’t have a formal set of resources they can access to help them navigate the decisions they need to make, and the intention is that at the end of the 3 years that will be created.
As part of this project, three research assistant positions will be created and be selected from the nursing program, with students having an opportunity to gain experience in a range of different activities related to the project.
With the addition of this funding, SLC has now had two NSERC funded projects announced this year, with a study looking at changing perceptions of nursing careers in the long-term care sector receiving funds in January.
