OHS Insider #4
Feb 23, 2012 // OHS Newsletter
OHS Insider #4 (February 23, 2012) PDF, 2p. 940KB
OHS News
The Ontario Health Study approaches a major milestone!
Thanks to each and every one of you, we are now very close to reaching the milestone of 100,000 participants with completed questionnaires. This is an amazing way to start the new year! As of Feb. 14, more than 95,000 participants have completed the OHS questionnaire. We’ll be in touch when we reach this incredible milestone.
Such a large number of participants makes the Ontario Health Study one of the biggest and most successful health research studies in the world. The OHS is already the largest health study in Canadian history. So congratulations for being a part of something big – and thank you!
If you’re interested in becoming an OHS Community Champion and helping us to recruit even more Ontarians into the Study, please visit OntarioHealthStudy.ca’s Community page.
What's new at OntarioHealthStudy.ca
We have a couple of new videos for you to check out at OntarioHealthStudy.ca. The first is an OHS on the Street video, where Ontarians tell us why health matters to them. The other new video is the inaugural profile in our series of Meet the Researchers videos. Our first researcher profiled is Dr. Lorraine Lipscombe, a physician at Women’s College Hospital who co-chairs our Diabetes Working Group. You can find these videos on our Community page.
What’s Next?
The Ontario Health Study has always enjoyed the support of physicians who work in hospitals and clinics across Ontario. So it was a natural progression for the OHS to look to hospital clinics and medical facilities as good venues for telling potential participants about the Study. We’re happy to report that recruitment efforts undertaken by Women’s College Hospital, Sunnybrook Hospital’s Odette Cancer Centre and the STOP Study (the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s anti-smoking program) have proven successful.
The next phase of the Study’s clinic-based recruitment is set to take place at Women’s College Hospital (WCH). Currently in the Osteoporosis Clinic, OHS recruitment will expand to the After Cancer Transition Treatment (ACTT) Clinic and other clinics within the hospital’s department of Medicine. “Women’s College Hospital has been a loyal supporter of the Ontario Health Study since its inception and we’re very pleased they’ve agreed to allow more patients to learn about the Study whilst they are at the hospital attending their medical appointments,” says Dr. Sutapa Mukherjee, clinical lead of the Ontario Health Study and a respirologist and sleep physician at WCH. “Clinic-based recruitment is a natural fit for the OHS and will play an important role in the Study’s success going forward.”
What you need to know
Limited-time OHS Air Miles / Gift Card offers
If you’re thinking about encouraging your family and friends to join the Ontario Health Study, now is the ideal time. The OHS is currently offering two thank you gift offers to those who complete the Study’s questionnaire. If they fill out the questionnaire by March 15, they can choose a $10 gift card from one of 12 exciting retailers, ranging from Best Buy to Walmart. Or if they’re AIR MILES® collectors, they may want to choose 35 AIR MILES® reward miles as their thank you for participating. The AIR MILES® offer ends on March 20. Both of these offers can be found on our homepage at OntarioHealthStudy.ca.
You’re very important to us – please stay in touch!
If you’ve changed any of your contact information (address, phone, email), please log in to your OHS homepage and update it. If you’ve provided information for contacts outside your household (whom we contact only if our efforts to contact you prove unsuccessful), please update that information if necessary.
A change to information kept by the OHS
When you registered to take part in the Study, you provided your age, sex and the first three digits of your postal code. This de-identified information was kept by the OHS even if you decided not to go on to participate in the Study. This information, along with the recently added question asking new participants where they heard about the Study, will now be kept on our encrypted database should you decide to withdraw from the Study. If you prefer to opt out of this, please send us an email to info@ontariohealthstudy.ca.
OHS Featured Participant
The Ontario Health Study team gratefully acknowledges the contribution of our participant Agnes. Thank you for making a difference, Agnes!
“Having lost someone close to me to cancer, I believe studies like this are important to us and to our children. By following the health of a large group of people, researchers may discover new risk factors for diseases. That this could lead to the discovery of ways to prevent these diseases is very exciting. I also hope the data can be used to research new drugs to combat cancer.”
Meet an OHS Researcher: Dr. Craig Earle
Specialty: Medical Oncology / Health Services Research
OHS Scientific Working Group: Cancer
An accomplishment you take pride in: Establishing the ‘cd-link’ program (www.cd-link.ices.on.ca) to make health-related data more available to
researchers.
Research discovery that inspired you: That if we could just appropriately apply the knowledge we already have, we could have more impact on health than any single new discovery has had.
Your hopes for the OHS: To be a resource for health research from basic science through population health to health services research for decades to come.
To view our first Meet the Researchers video, please visit the Ontario Health Study’s YouTube channel. To read bios of our researchers, visit OntarioHealthStudy.ca and select the Our Researchers section under the “About the Study” drop-down menu.