Connaught Award recipient designing an app to help parents of children with cancer manage their pain
Lindsay Jibb, an assistant professor at the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, has received a Connaught New Researcher Award from the University of Toronto. This prestigious award will help fund one of her current projects, a digital health intervention that aims to assist parents of children with cancer in managing their child’s cancer pain at home.
“Receiving this award is an honour, especially knowing the calibre of new researchers I am joining across the university,” says Jibb. “This integral funding will allow my team and me to conduct important user testing with parents who are the key to our digital intervention success.”
The core of Jibb’s work and the design of this digital intervention is grounded in understanding what parents want and need. She has worked hand in hand with the Ontario Parents Advocating for Children with Cancer (OPACC) Advisory group and conducted previous studies at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the Children’s Hospital of Orange County in the United States, where she and her team found that parents overwhelmingly indicated their need for real-time support and connection to clinicians once their child was no longer in hospital receiving treatment.
Easing the burden of pain management
“The burden of caring and pain management for these children falls on parents when they are at home, and kids can experience frequent and sometimes severe cancer pain,” says Jibb. “The goal of our mobile app is to ease this burden and help both parents and children receive better quality pain management.”
