Kara Schick-Makaroff, Ph.D.

Award: Can-SOLVE CKD-KRESCENT New Investigator Award
Institution: University of Alberta
Year: 2016-2019

Lay Summary

Dr. Kara Schick-Makaroff is a New Investigator at the University of Alberta. She obtained her PhD in Nursing from the University of Victoria. She completed her Post Doctoral Fellowship, funded by the KRESCENT program, with Dr. Anita Molzahn at the University of Alberta.

Building on her Post Doctoral research, Dr. Schick-Makaroff’s program of research broadly focuses on enhancing quality of life, enriching person-centred care, and improving services for people affected by chronic kidney disease. This illness significantly impacts peoples’ views of their health, emotions, work, and relationships. Clinicians need patients’ views about how chronic kidney disease impacts their overall life so that they can respond to any concerns. One way to do this is to use patient-reported outcomes that ask people to share the impact of an illness on their life. Examples of patient-reported outcomes include surveys asking about quality of life or symptoms. Patient-reported outcomes provide vital and often missing information to the healthcare team. The purpose of Dr. Schick-Makaroff’s research is to study the impact of routine use of electronically provided patient-reported outcomes data in kidney care settings and to influence positive change in health services. Findings of this research may ultimately improve the quality of health services for Canadians living with chronic kidney disease.