Dr. Stanley Galant is director of this innovative treatment and research project called the Children's Hospital of Orange County Breathmobile™, and for his efforts, he will take home the Outstanding Community Research Physician award at the first-ever Community Health Research Awards. Galant will be among those honored at the Wednesday, Sept. 10, award dinner instigated and organized by the Institute for Clinical & Translational Science at UC Irvine.
(Media-Newswire.com) - It’s one thing to study childhood asthma in a lab, staring at allergens through a microscope. It’s another altogether to take your “lab” to a dusty school parking lot, sit face-to-face with coughing, wheezing and congested children, and tell them, for perhaps the first time, “You have asthma, and we can help you.”
Dr. Stanley Galant is director of this innovative treatment and research project called the Children’s Hospital of Orange County Breathmobile™, and for his efforts, he will take home the Outstanding Community Research Physician award at the first-ever Community Health Research Awards. Galant will be among those honored at the Wednesday, Sept. 10, award dinner instigated and organized by the Institute for Clinical & Translational Science at UC Irvine.
The Community Health Research Awards were created to recognize outstanding community-based clinical research and treatment efforts and to raise awareness of the need to take what’s learned in the lab and take it to the people who need it most.
“UC Irvine Health Affairs is committed to transforming laboratory discoveries into products and programs that benefit the community,” said Dr. David Bailey, health affairs vice chancellor. “Without our community partners, our clinical research efforts could not exist. This partnership creates a synergy that is the life blood of the Institute.”
In addition to Galant’s honor, Bailey will be on hand to present the Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for Community-Based Participatory Research award to Dr. Roberto Trevino of the Bienestar Health Program, a school-based diabetes prevention study conducted in San Antonio, Texas.
Other award winners include:
Kathleen Adlard of CHOC, Outstanding Community Research Nurse, for her work as a principal investigator for nursing research studies in pediatric oncology.
Karen L. McGlinn of Share Our Selves, Community Health Care Research Advocate, for her work to develop cooperation between community programs and research.
Dr. Israel De Alba of UCI, Promising Community Research Investigator, who partnered with Latino Health Access on a study to assess satisfaction with self-collection of samples for human papillomavirus testing among Latinas in Orange County.
Nahla Kayali and Barry Ross, Community Incubator Award recipients. Kayali is the founding director of Access California Services, which measures health needs in the Arab American and Muslim American communities. And Ross of St. Jude Hospital collaborated with UCI on a GIS mapping project and community health needs assessment. As for Galant, he began working with asthmatic children in 1970. While he conducted many laboratory-based research and drug studies on the disease, he found that the research opportunities afforded by the Breathmobile could not be matched in the lab. By going into the community, he gets to work with undiagnosed and untreated children in their own environment, which gives him a better understanding of asthma’s epidemiology. His research has shown that between 20 percent and 25 percent of elementary school children in Orange County’s poorer neighborhoods have the disease.
“We deal with underserved and often untreated asthmatic children at the schools or in community clinics who are in need of better diagnostic tools and more effective therapeutic programs,” he said. “Recognition of this unique effort has been a great inspiration to me, since the results can lead to a better level of care for many asthmatic children.”
Currently, Galant is developing detection and diagnostic methods that can be used for Caucasian, Hispanic and Asian children. He has worked with children as young as 4 in an effort to detect and treat cases earlier.
“Although more challenging in some ways from laboratory-based research, this translational research may be more clinically relevant, since it is performed in a ‘real world’ situation,” he said.
Orange County’s two Breathmobile teams hit the road four days a week, carrying teams of doctors, nurses, pharmacologists and medical students. Once children are diagnosed, the teams conduct monthly follow-up visits to measure the effectiveness of treatment by counting school days missed, emergency department visits and hospitalizations. Since the mobile units only see eight to 10 patients a day, the medical teams can spend more time with each child to make sure their long-term efforts are working.
“Many times, these children had no idea what was wrong with them before we diagnosed them,” Galant said. “They had trouble running; they thought they had chronic colds or bronchitis. But nobody had mentioned the “A” word. When we diagnose and treat them and when they can run and breathe, it’s a great relief. ”
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