Her research focuses on two areas: 1) Studying the impact of arthritis on employment and preventing work disability. To that effect, she has developed Making-it-WorkTM , an online program helping people with arthritis deal with employment issues. 2) Evaluating the quality of health care services received by people with RA and conducting pharmaco-epidemiology studies, using BC administrative health data. Her research has been supported by peer reviewed grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Arthritis Network, The Arthritis Society of Canada and the Canadian Rheumatology Association.
She holds peer-reviewed operating grants for her research from CIHR. She has published her research in Arthritis and Rheumatism, Annals of Rheumatic Diseases, Arthritis Care and Research, Journal of Rheumatology, Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Human Immunology, Health Policy, Lancet, and Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.
She has received distinction awards for her contribution to rheumatology research, including the Jeff Shiroky Award for excellence in rheumatoid arthritis research, the Young Investigator Award from the Canadian Rheumatology Association and the Quality of Life Research Award from the Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis (IMHA)—a distinction award for having obtained the highest score of all applications in Arthritis, Pain and Disability. Finally, she was a recipient of the Martin M. Hoffman Award for Excellence in Research at the University of British Columbia and in 2013, she was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Award for her research contributions.
Building on her research on employment and arthritis, she has developed the first comprehensive program specifically designed to prevent Work Disability (WD) in employed people with inflammatory arthritis, such as RA. The program enhances self-management of problems encountered at work due to arthritis and modifies risk factors for WD. The program was pilot tested and showed promising results. It resulted in concrete changes and improved self-confidence and self-rated productivity at work. Her team has converted this program into a web-based version, in order to make this valuable resource more accessible to people with RA all over the province. She has received CIHR funding to test the program’s effectiveness at reducing WD and improving at work productivity in a randomized controlled trial. By preventing WD, this research will reduce the tremendous economic and social burden of RA.
As part of her research evaluating the quality of care for RA at the population level, she has assembled a population-based cohort of RA patients in BC. This research has exposed important gaps in care for RA. She found that the majority of RA patients do not receive the care that is recommended for their disease. More than half are not using the medications considered essential for RA (DMARDs) and few are followed by rheumatologists. These results point to the need for educating family physicians and people with RA about the shift in treatment paradigms in RA, and to the need for increased rheumatologist access and manpower. She is now evaluating the impact of educational interventions, such as academic detailing to Family Physicians, on the quality of care delivered to people with rheumatoid arthritis.
She is also evaluating the effect of medications used to treat RA on cardiovascular disease. Her research has been looking at other chronic medical conditions that people with RA are at risk of, such as cardiovascular diseases, infections and osteoporosis, and evaluating how these are treated and how medications used for RA may impact these conditions.
This research is important to people with RA and their health care providers, and has potential to improve the quality of care and outcome of RA.
