Jean's Story - Research [PaCER]

The Patient and Community Engagement Research (PaCER) program, as part of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary and in partnership with Alberta Health Services through the Strategic Clinical Networks ™, is committed to transforming the role of patients in health care and health culture through engagement research.

As people with arthritis, Jean along with her PaCER colleague Sylvia Teare, collaborate with Alberta arthritis researchers to improve Albertans’ access to community support for self-managing their arthritis. Since completing their PaCER internship where they conducted a peer-to-peer analysis of The Experience of Waiting for Help with Osteoarthritis, they have worked on 3 PaCER studies that have brought a collective patient voice of osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and First Nations rheumatoid arthritis patients to an Alberta research initiative that is creating an optimal model of care for the efficient delivery of appropriate and effective arthritis care.