SickKids

SickKids was founded in 1875 when a group of Toronto women led by Elizabeth McMaster opened an eleven-room house as Canada's first children's hospital; the first patient arrived that April. It describes itself now as Canada's largest and most respected paediatric academic health sciences centre, with a research institute of more than 2,000 researchers, trainees and staff. Clinician-scientist Jennifer Stinson brought the research side of that to HealthTO in August 2018, and her talk was about what happens after the grant. She works in a tertiary chronic pain clinic and builds mobile tools for young people who have chronic pain — roughly a quarter of them, she said, and mostly invisible — because Canada has only ten paediatric pain clinics and her own sees perhaps seven to ten per cent of the children who need care. Her hardest lesson was structural rather than clinical: research funding pays to develop an app but not to sustain one, and when SickKids had no mobile strategy and no mobile developers, an app like Pain Squad could be built and then left unable to be updated. Her answer was partnership and a user-centred design process, on the argument that being able to build an app does not make an app the right solution.