Dr Angharad Hurley has been awarded a CMRF Emerging Researcher award for her paediatric ED research.
University of Otago, Christchurch, Senior Research Fellow Dr Angharad Hurley is one of two academics awarded a coveted Canterbury Medical Research Foundation (CMRF) Emerging Researcher Fellowship for 2024.
The $220,000 Fellowship will support Angharad, a Research Fellow in the campus’s Department of Paediatrics, with a study to examine whether socio-economic deprivation, geographic location and ethnicity are linked to emergency department admissions for children at Christchurch Hospital.
Angharad is “beyond delighted” to have been chosen for the CMRF grant.
Dr Angharad Hurley
“The grant will enable me to take a major step forward in a career I’ve been working towards since completing my PhD,” she says.
“This project will be the first stepping stone to a series of large-scale, impactful studies aimed at investigating whether equitable outcomes for children attending hospital are currently being achieved, or if they still require improvement. “
Christchurch Hospital’s Emergency Department treats approximately 25,000 children each year, yet Angharad says little is known about whether certain groups have an increased need for emergency care, similar reasons for attending, or comparable outcomes.
“There are very few research studies in Aotearoa New Zealand that identify which groups of children have worse health outcomes when presenting for emergency care specifically, which prevents us from being able to assess whether all children achieve equitable outcomes,” she says.
“It’s vitally important to determine whether children in certain ethnic and social groups are more likely to need emergency care, to compare their care pathway through the emergency health system, and to assess whether their health outcomes are related to factors external to their presenting condition.”
Angharad says the results will help inform the development of health interventions to better support groups that may be overrepresented in the data, and in finding ways to reduce visits to the ED when other solutions may better suit their needs.
“This project has the potential to highlight a new area of healthcare that needs more focused attention in order to improve health outcomes for children both in Canterbury and ultimately nationwide,” she says.
“We expect to use the study data not just as a baseline to assess efficacy of future interventions, but also to carry out cost-analysis studies, provide comparative data for other centres and countries, and as a template for future work for multi-centre studies looking at other aspects of paediatric hospital care in New Zealand.”
Emerging Researcher Fellowships are chosen by CMRF’s Fellowship Assessment Committee, made up of senior healthcare researchers in the region. The award is based on the candidate’s potential to advance the quality of health and wellbeing in Canterbury.
Angharad says winning the prestigious CMRF Emerging Researcher Fellowship validates the work she’s put into building her research acumen.
“It further shows that I’ve become an autonomous researcher who can set and deliver research goals and independently develop projects that funders believe will make a difference to health outcomes for children in New Zealand,” she says.
The second CMRF Emerging Researcher Fellowship for 2024 was awarded to Dr Megan Gath from the University of Canterbury’s Child Well-Being Research institute, for her project into understanding the impact of children’s screen exposure on developmental outcomes.