Grant: Planning Grants - Priority Announcement: Cancer Research

Integrative oncology is an evidence-based whole-person clinical approach to care that combines conventional medical therapy with complementary interventions for cancer prevention and management. With over half of all cancer patients using complementary therapies, many community-based integrative oncology models have emerged across North America and internationally. The emergence of these models of care raises many questions, including how to best integrate this kind of care into the existing Canadian health care system to ensure equitable access to safe, patient-centred, comprehensive cancer care across the cancer spectrum. We propose to bring together health system researchers, biomedical and complementary medicine practitioners, ethicists, patient representatives and knowledge users to: 1) Identify specific research questions that form a coherent research program related to models of community-based integrative oncology; 2) Strengthen existing relationships and develop new ones to ensure a coordinated and collaborative approach to the study of integrative oncology models and to facilitate uptake of research results; 3) Begin to develop specific research projects to form the basis of a CIHR Team Grant, and 4) Prioritize an action plan and a timeline to prepare a Team Grant submission in Spring 2012. A preeminent group of experts interested in integrative oncology research will form the core group of participants for this two-day meeting, with the ultimate goal to develop a CIHR Team Grant application based on a relevant and coherent research program related to models of community-based integrative oncology. Results of the meeting, including priority research questions developed through a pre-meeting Delphi process, will be shared with the broader community through publication in Current Oncology, a report to Canadian integrative medicine researchers and practitioners and a workshop at the 9th International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology.