A former Steinbach resident has received a $100,000 grant for research into dementia. Dr. Heather Campbell-Enns is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Canadian Mennonite University. The grant comes from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The project is titled: Best Practices: Transitions from Hospital to Community-Based Settings for Rural and Remote Persons with Dementia. Campbell-Enns says the research project will identify ways to coordinate care for people with dementia who live in rural and remote areas. She notes previous research has already shown that rural folks with dementia and their families often face much greater challenges than those in urban areas.

"Services in rural and remote areas are often fragmented or maybe some services don't exist that exist in urban areas. And all of this means that people with dementia and their caregivers, in particular, need to really put a lot of extra effort into accessing services and coordinating care for people with dementia. This research is hoping to look for ways to help that run more smoothly for families."

Campbell-Enns says they hope to complete this phase of the research within the next year and she will then apply for funding for phase two, to test the concepts.

"At the end of this project (phase one), we want to have one or two specific interventions or ways for improving care identified and then we're going to be adapting them for rural or remote areas. Then we will apply for funding to implement them in a rural area, we're looking at areas of Manitoba and we're partnering with an area of Newfoundland to do the same work. We would like to implement them in those places and evaluate the implementation and see if it's useful and sustainable for those areas."

Campbell-Enns notes many dementia patients would like to stay home longer and this research aims to find ways to make that happen.

"That's one of our hopes. Many people do want to stay in their homes as long as possible, as long as they can safely live there and feel like they've got good quality of life and we want to support that as best we can. We think this kind of project can do that for families who want that. We really know that family members need a lot of support and we hope that this project provides support for families so that people with dementia can stay in their communities longer."

Her team is made up of researchers, health care policy makers, and patients and their family members from two provinces, Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador. Also represented are three universities, CMU, University of Manitoba, and Memorial University, and two rural health regions, Prairie Mountain Health in Manitoba and Western Health in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Campbell-Enns holds a Bachelor of Education, a MSc in Family Social Sciences, and a PhD in the Interdisciplinary Program, all from the University of Manitoba. She has been teaching at CMU since 2018.