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UBC Okanagan's Health Equity Lab is looking for participants for their research on compassionate in home healthcare in areas covered by Interior Health and Vancouver Health.

The lab will be conducting research on home and community care offered by Interior and Vancouver Health and is seeking patients who've received this type of care or caregivers of these patients who would be willing to share their experiences and thoughts on whether or not the care is compassionate.

"We're hoping to find out if that care people have received is compassionate or not and how or why people feel it's compassionate," Nicole Ketter, Research Manager, says.

"The point of the project is to understand if care is being perceived as compassionate or not within Interior Health - we're also with Vancouver Health as well - and develop a dictionary of compassionate terms to look through electronic health records for these words of compassion to see if that's being documented in people's health records."

Individuals who choose to participate should be ready to dedicate one or two hours to the research for which they will be compensated.

Questions they will have to answer will revolve around the care they received and how they would qualify it.

"We are hoping to do focus groups, so participants would be a part of one to two-hour focus groups, over Zoom, where we go through these questions and there would be a maximum of five other people in the group. As a thank you to participants offering their time, we're also offering a $40 honorarium to help offset the cost of participating," Ketter says.

"We'll ask questions like 'Did the provider show genuine concern and were they sensitive, attentive, comfortable, supportive?' and from those answers, we'll pull out keywords to make the dictionary."

The goal of the research is to study compassion within healthcare and to find out how it is understood by patients.

The lab will use artificial intelligence to create this dictionary and hopes to generate knowledge on this topic that isn't researched much in the world of healthcare.

"We can also look through and see how often these words are being talked about in the electronic health records too. This research project is a secondary project to one we did with health equity and social determinants of health in which we studied if patients' holistic background was being discussed in electronic health records right now. Secondarily, we're looking at compassion because it's one of those things that is important for healthcare but difficult to write and to capture objectively," Ketter says. "We're trying to see if we can take this subjective thing, that is compassion, and how is it being talked about objectively.

"Our lab works with different AI tools, specifically with this program called Natural Language Processing tool and this tool will help us, once we have that list of words, to search through the electronic health records and the goal is to see if care is being received compassionately to write reports on this and report back to health authorities to generate knowledge on the topic."

To find out more about the Health Informatics Equity Lab and the research project visit their website here. Those who are interested in participating should email the lab at healthinformatics.equity@ubc.ca.

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