Kimberly A. Randell, MD, MSc
Professor of Pediatrics, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine; Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics, University of Kansas School of Medicine
Full Biography
Children’s Mercy Research Institute was approved for a funding award through the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award Program, an initiative of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). The funds will support a project to build patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research on intimate partner violence intervention in the pediatric healthcare setting.
Kimberly Randell, MD, MSc, Emergency Medicine, will lead the two-year project at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, working with project co-lead Maya Ragavan, MD, MPH, MS, of UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh.
Patient-centered comparative effectiveness research (CER) compares the effectiveness of two or more health care interventions or approaches by examining their risks and benefits with a focus on what matters to patients and their families, as well as healthcare team members.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) includes physical, sexual, psychological, economic, and reproductive abuse as well as other types of abuse. It is an urgent public health epidemic; one in four US adults experience IPV in their lifetime and 15 million US children are exposed to IPV annually. IPV has devastating impacts on survivors, their children and their communities. Children exposed to intimate partner violence face increased risks for developmental delays, poor mental and physical health, academic underachievement, child abuse and more.
“By supporting survivors and their children, we hope to break the intergenerational cycles of trauma and improve the health and wellbeing of both survivors and their children,” said Dr. Randell. “Pediatric healthcare settings offer unique opportunities to support IPV survivors, but gaps in previous research mean that we don’t yet know the best way to do this. This project is the first step in filling in those gaps.”
To date, there is limited CER research to determine best practices to support intimate partner violence survivors within pediatric health care settings or how to implement IPV interventions effectively and sustainably in this setting. Most research that has been conducted focuses on adult health care settings not pediatric ones.
The goal of this project is to bring together an array of patient and other stakeholders to co-create a patient-centered CER agenda around how best to support and connect survivors to resources in pediatric health care settings. Stakeholders include caregiver IPV survivors, IPV agencies, community organizations, pediatric health team members, and researchers.
The CER agenda will address critical gaps in intimate partner violence research and provide a foundation to build, grow and disseminate a program of patient-centered CER to develop and test pediatric health care-based IPV interventions.
The project’s objectives include:
- Convene and train a collaborative of stakeholders in patient-centered CER best practices, intimate partner violence and health equity.
- Conduct community listening sessions to identify key evidence gaps and unanswered questions around multilevel patient-centered IPV interventions in pediatric health care settings.
- Co-create and disseminate a patient-centered CER research agenda to improve caregiver and child health outcomes through survivor-centered IPV interventions in pediatric health care settings.
”Building Capacity for Patient-Centered CER on Intimate Partner Violence Intervention in Pediatric Healthcare Settings” is part of a portfolio of projects funded by PCORI to help develop a community of patients, caregivers, clinicians and other stakeholders who are better equipped to engage as partners in all phases of patient-centered CER and to disseminate results of PCORI-funded studies. Through its Engagement Award Program, PCORI is creating an expansive network of individuals, communities and organizations who can leverage their lived experience and expertise to influence research to be more patient-centered, relevant and useful.
PCORI is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information that is needed to make better-informed health care decisions.
The project team includes Tanya Draper-Douthit, Chief Operating Officer, Rose Brooks Center; Nicole Molinaro, President/CEO, Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh; and Virginia Duplessis, Associate Director of Health, Futures Without Violence. Consultants for the project are Sharla Smith, PhD, MPH, University of Kansas Medical Center, and Elizabeth Miller, MD, PhD, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.