Defining Your Unique Needs for Research Success: Behind the Scenes of a Study on COVID-19 Public Policy

In plain language, what is your project about? What questions are you trying to answer by doing this research?

Alcohol is a commonly-used drug with well-known risks. Canadian provincial governments allowed alcohol stores to remain open during the COVID-19 pandemic, because they predicted that closing the stores would have a significant impact on people who are dependent on alcohol. However, the decision to keep alcohol stores open and increasing the ease of access (e.g., delivery) could have other public health implications. Anecdotally, we have heard from health care that this decision may have led to fewer people coming to the emergency room for acute drinking-related injuries, such as alcohol-related violence or injuries resulting from drinking and driving.

Alcohol is a drug that is habit-forming, though. People who might consume normal amounts of alcohol may have changed their drinking patterns entirely during the pandemic. If those habits continue, we may instead find more long-term impacts to people’s health, such as liver disease and alcohol dependence.
 
So, our study is looking at a few data sources to better understand what is happening with alcohol consumption during this pandemic. In addition to data before and during the pandemic from the emergency room and from the government alcohol stores, we distributed a survey to the general public. We wanted to know more about possible factors that may help explain what we find in the data. What people are worried about, if anything, during the pandemic; are they worried about financial stability or job loss? Are they anxious, or depressed? We aren’t linking the people who respond to the survey to any healthcare or alcohol sales data, but what we hope it will do is shed some light on whatever patterns we do find in those datasets.
 
With the results, we hope to inform provincial health care policy, planning and service delivery as tied to public health preparedness. For example, in the event of similar circumstances in the future, the information from our study will help public health officials direct resources towards relevant services.

Looking at your research team members, there are people from other departments and institutions. Have you worked together before this project?

This is an inter-provincial study: researchers in Saint John have teamed up to collaborate with researchers in Halifax to run similar studies on their respective local and provincial data.

​The collaboration developed organically from previous, smaller research partnerships. Drs. French and Dutton had previously worked together on other emergency medicine and trauma research projects, and are currently working on a paper describing the rates of death attributed to trauma in New Brunswick. Dr. Atkinson had recently connected with Dr. Dutton to consult on one of his medical student’s analyses for their research project. 

Dr. Dan Dutton

Dr. Asbridge is a national leader in substance use and epidemiology and had the idea to run this project in Nova Scotia. Since the team existed in Saint John, it seemed natural for the research teams to collaborate and run the studies in parallel.

How – if at all – has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your research project and/or collaboration?

In this case, it changed the project by making it exist. Even though we all represent different areas of research interest, COVID-19 touches on multiple research agendas. We recognized a potential area of concern – consumption of a substance during an unusual and stressful circumstance, and the treatment of specific, alcohol-related conditions during a pandemic – and that we all were interested in working on the problem. It became a recipe for a perfect opportunity to collaborate.

What advice would you give to others on building a successful research collaboration?

Discuss your needs, and find out what others need, too. A collaboration is only successful when it can effectively meet everyone’s needs. To do that, we have to recognize that each person will have different incentives to participating in research, and that we need to be explicit in identifying and sharing those needs so that they can be fulfilled.
 
Being explicit in discussing what you need from a project is especially important when you are working with researchers from other disciplines. Some individuals want their research to create evidence that changes clinical care, or that leads to the development of a policy that influences the practice of healthcare. It’s not necessarily the only motivator for an academic researcher, though, who may be more interested in sharing the research in more traditional academic settings. Each discipline has its own norms, expectations and definitions of what “successful” research looks like; if you don’t discuss those upfront, it can be more difficult to organize and run your project.
 
Not everyone will share your enthusiasm for the same deliverables. But as long as you have that initial, open conversation, it is possible to plan the project to achieve everyone’s goals.

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This project, Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Alcohol Consumption and Related Harms among New Brunswick Adults, was funded through a New Brunswick Innovation Foundation COVID-19 research grant. The team is beginning to analyze the results of their study; this space will be updated with references once published

Dr. Daniel J. Dutton
Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, Dalhousie University, Faculty of Medicine
 
Dr. Mark Asbridge
Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, Dalhousie University, Faculty of Medicine
 
Tong Liu
Research Associate, Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, Dalhousie University, Faculty of Medicine
 
Dr. Keith Brunt
Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacology, Dalhousie University, Faculty of Medicine
 
Dr. Paul Atkinson
Emergency Medicine, Saint John Regional Hospital, Horizon Health Network
Assistant Dean, Research, and Professor, Dalhousie Medicine
 
Dr. James French
Emergency Medicine, Saint John Regional Hospital, Horizon Health Network
Assistant Professor, Dalhousie Medicine