Improving the Provision of Mental Health Care for Patients with End-Stage Renal Disease and Their Caregivers

Dr. Cindy Blitz, Executive Director at the Center for Effective School Practices, Rutgers University (RU-CESP), and Seema Basi, M.D., were approved for a $50,000 funding award by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to support a project on improving the provision of mental health care for patients with end-stage renal disease and their caregivers. RU-CESP used the funds provided through PCORI’s Pipeline to Proposal Awards program to build a partnership of individuals and groups who shared a desire to advance patient-centered outcomes research focused on establishing a patient-caregiver-clinician-researcher partnership (PCCRP) for patients suffering from renal failure. Pipeline to Proposal Awards enabled individuals and groups that were not typically involved in clinical research to develop the means to create community-led funding proposals focused on patient-centered comparative effectiveness research (CER). Established by the non-profit PCORI, the program funded efforts to help individuals or groups build community partnerships, develop research capacity, and refine a comparative effectiveness research question that could become the basis of a research funding proposal to submit to PCORI or other health research funders. Through the PCCRP, the goal was to identify potentially effective mechanisms for increasing access to and utilization of mental health treatment for dialysis patients. The partnership team consisted of individuals with a diverse set of expertise, perspectives, and roles, including caregivers and advocates. Together, they worked to establish a collaborative communication platform—both face-to-face and online—that enabled the types of conversations and exchanges they envisioned.