Submitted by AsthmaWorkplace on Sun, 2006-07-30 20:27
The Commission en santé et sécurité du travail du Québec (CSST, www.csst.qc.ca/portail/en), the Center’s strategic partner, hosted the summer meeting of the Center for Asthma in the Workplace on June 27. We would like to thank our hosts, in particular Dr. Jules Turcot, who organized the meeting.
Activities included progress reports by principal investigators for the seven projects funded by the Center for 2005. The presentations were enthusiastically received and led to extremely constructive exchanges, showing just how useful these meetings are. Dr. Malo announced funding from the FRSQ’s Respiratory Health Network (RHN, http://www.rsr.chus.qc.ca), which will enable us to initiate national and international joint efforts on occupational asthma. He also mentioned that the Center had received an extremely positive preliminary evaluation, and noted some comments made by the outside evaluators.
Dr. Malo stated that the GEREQ group was no longer in operation, which poses a problem in terms of managing data forms for research projects. The service, which was available to researchers from the Center for Asthma in the Workplace, included creating customized forms for studies and file management on secure sites. Mrs Jocelyne L’Archevêque, the primary resource person working on forms completed with GEREQ to date, has taken the forms and turned them into Access files. The files will be made available to researchers so that they can benefit from data entry support designed for use with various studies.
It was announced that preparations for the 3rd Jack Pepys Symposium, to be held in Montreal in May 2007, are already underway.
The Center is pursuing its mission for the transfer of knowledge, getting our researchers involved in developing on-line training. An expert in on-line education, Véronique Besançon, an educational development officer at CEFES (the Centre d'études et de formation en enseignement supérieur) at the Université de Montréal, will make a presentation to the researchers involved on how to design on-line training courses. The next meeting of researchers and partners for the Center, at which students awarded scholarships in 2006 will present their work, is scheduled for the fall.