Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

This application is to support the recruitment and engagement of a central lived experience advisory board to support mental health research at The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) and Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI). To do this, we will recruit, interview, and engage 10 lived experience advisory board members with an eye towards the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion. We will host an orientation session which includes information on patient engagement, targeted learning for people with lived and living experience and researchers alike, and makes space to set an agenda for mental health research at TOH/OHRI. Following the orientation sessions, the advisory board will meet every two months to co-develop application(s) for funding. This will involve researchers and people with lived and living experience collaborating to identify research priorities, develop research questions, determine study design, and outline the knowledge translation plan. The goal is to submit at least one application for funding to the Fall 2024 CIHR Project grant competition. This project will build capacity for patient engagement and patient-oriented research through: providing ongoing opportunities for both lived experience partners and researchers to build capacity in patient-oriented mental health research; building confidence among lived experience partners to participate in discussions about research priorities and study conduct; and, providing opportunities for lived experience partners to be co-Investigators on grant applications, co-presenters at conferences, and co-authors on manuscripts. Our engagement and capacity building approaches have been informed by the Strategy for Patient Oriented Research's Framework for Engagement and Capacity Development Framework. This proposal directly support's SPOR's key principles of inclusiveness, support, mutual respect, and co-building.