Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

Canadians are aging and older people are more likely to need heart surgery than younger people. As a patient gets older, they have less ability to recover from a health stress (such as an infection or surgery). This lack of ability to recover to normal life after a stress is called frailty. When older adults with frailty need to have heart surgery, they tend to stay longer in the intensive care unit (ICU), lose weight and muscle, are less steady on their feet, have a harder time driving, and are less likely to go back to their own home. They are also more likely to be confused (which is known as delirium), need to go back to hospital after going home, are not as mentally quick as they used to be, and may even die. Altogether, this condition is called post-intensive care syndrome (PICS) and may be caused, at least in part, by a long stay in an ICU. My research has three objectives. In Aim 1, I am doing a scoping review of past research to learn what is currently known about the mental and physical symptoms of PICS following heart surgery. This will give us a starting point of what is known and what we need to improve upon. The next step (Aim 2) will then work with patients and families who have been through heart surgery and who had a long stay in the ICU to learn from their experiences about why PICS happens and their ideas about how we can prevent it from happening for other people who will be undergoing heart surgery in the future. We are very interested in using ideas that patients and family come up with to find new, real world solutions to help patients who may be at risk for PICS after heart surgery. Aim 3 will then conduct a randomized controlled trial to determine if the patient-identified solutions (which is often called an intervention in health research) reduces the prevalence of PICS following heart surgery. By preventing PICS, we predict that frail, older adult patients will have a quicker recovery and better quality of life after heart surgery.