Socioeconomic Status and Post-Injury Quality of Life and Functional Ability
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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This K23 award will allow the candidate to obtain the training and skills necessary to develop and lead patient-oriented research projects in the field of quality of life and functional outcomes after injury. The aims of the career development plan are for the candidate to acquire core knowledge, to gain further expertise in research methodology, data management and interpretation, and to strengthen his scientific writing, and academic leadership skills. To achieve the career development aims, the candidate will have an interdisciplinary mentor team, will have an in-depth didactic experience, will carry out a mentored research project and will develop future research protocols in his area of interest. The candidate's mentored research plan will utilize the resources of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and guidance of the candidate's mentors (Donna Hathaway, PhD, Andrew Bush, PhD, and Timothy Fabian, MD) to achieve the specific aims of the project. The specific aims are: (1) To determine the relationship between pre-injury socioeconomic status and functional ability following moderate to severe injury; (2) To investigate the association between pre-injury socioeconomic status and quality of life following moderate to severe injury. To address these aims 250 moderately to severely injured persons admitted to the only Level I Trauma Center for a 150-mile radius to Memphis, Tennessee will be followed for one year. Detailed information regarding participants' individual level socioeconomic status and pre-injury quality of life and functional ability will be obtained as close to the time of admission as possible. The specific census tract group in which the participant lives will be determined using geocoding. From this information specific neighborhood level socioeconomic indicators will be determined from Census Data. Over the follow-up period, determinations of functional ability and quality of life will be made. The relationship between pre-injury socioeconomic status on the individual and neighborhood level and post-injury functional ability and quality of life will be determined using hierarchical linear modeling. Because injury touches over 28 million Americans a year from all walks of life, understanding how socioeconomic status influences recovery after injury is critical. Once this relationship is understood, interventions can be designed to ensure that injured people from all walks of life will achieve the highest levels of functional ability and quality of life possible after injury.
