INRS launches new Quebec research network to study regional health

The National Institute of Scientific Research (INRS) inaugurated a new Quebec health research network on Thursday dedicated to the needs of rural and remote regions of the province.

The mission of the Healthy Rural and Remote Communities (CARES) network will be to contribute to the well-being of these communities by improving health, care and social services, while preventing disease in these regions “too often ignored or forgotten,” it was explained in a press release.

“We must ensure that this population is taken into account at the same level as urban and peri-urban communities, which are often studied more,” explained the director of the CARES network, Professor Cathy Vaillancourt of INRS, to The Canadian Press.

“It’s really to put the emphasis on these populations, especially since the problems are not necessarily the same from one region to another.”

It is noted that health indicators for populations in rural and remote areas – whether life expectancy, the rate of occurrence of numerous pathologies or even mental health issues – highlight a comparative disadvantage with urban and peri-urban regions.

CARES will notably create working groups to facilitate the pooling of expertise in the field, which will make it possible to address themes such as northern health; global health in remote regions; or even indigenous health and the trajectories of care and services for vulnerable populations in rural and remote areas.

“We have a very vast province,” said Vaillancourt. “We want to identify problems or research topics in three or four defined regions, then develop tools that can then be used effectively and quickly to address the challenges of the different regions.”

Regional forums will be set up, she said, to identify issues that may or may not be common to different regions and that must be addressed as a priority, “such as aging, youth and contaminants.”

“Growing old in the regions is not the same problem as growing old in large cities,” Vaillancourt emphasized. 

Project leaders believe that the anchor points represented by the establishments of the Université du Québec network and their partners will create “favorable conditions for the training of qualified personnel in the region and thus improve the quality of care and services offered to regional communities,” it was stated in a press release.

It will also be important to establish a dialogue with partners and communities, said Vaillancourt, to verify that the problem has been analyzed in depth and that tools have been put in place, but also to ensure a presence to adjust the tools as needed.

“What makes it work? What makes it work less well?” she said. “Often there are things that we install and that work the first year, but then something happens that we hadn’t planned for (…) and it doesn’t work anymore. We have to stay there to see how we adapt (the solutions) to the evolution of life and what’s going to happen.”

The CARES network will be co-led by Benoît Barbeau of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Martin Descarreaux of the University of Trois-Rivières and Marie-Hélène Morin of the University of Quebec in Rimouski. 

The CARES network is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – secteur Santé (FRQ-S) in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Social Services, to the tune of $4 million since April 2024.

CARES is one of 15 thematic networks whose objective is to exercise “unifying leadership” within the Quebec scientific community and to create greater cohesion around targeted themes, explained INRS.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews