Less travel and less pain for kids thanks to new LHSC-Shriners Hospital program

LHSC is partnering with Montreal’s Shriners Hospital to help children battling rare bone conditions. Sean Irvine explains.

Parents with children battling rare bone conditions in London and southwestern Ontario can look forward to fewer trips to a Montreal hospital in the future.

That is the goal of the next phase of a joint initiative between London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) and the Shriners Hospital for Children, dubbed STAR.

It comes nearly two decades after an effort to bring the Shriners Hospital from Montreal to London failed.

In the aftermath, local children and their families continued to commute to Quebec.

While that won’t end with the STAR partnership, patients can expect better access to local care and research closer to home.

Already, a partnering monthly clinic at LHSC has seen 111 patients.

“We want to make sure that we can reach out to our partnering pediatric sites to ensure that we can bring care closer to home,” said Kelly Thorstad, acting administrator of Shriners Hospitals for Children Canada.

“We do share many patients who get treatment here, but they have also come to Montreal. And if we can make that trip one less trip, so that they can come locally, well, that is one of our main goals,” she said.

London-based Mocha Shriners will support LHSC programs.

The fraternal organization tells CTV News it has committed $1.5 million over five years, with one-third allocated to the STAR program.

Its goal is to track and speed up treatment plans for children.

“When you have an optimized treatment for a rare bone condition, you expect to have less pain. You expect to have less need for surgery. You expect to have improved function of mobility. So, running, playing, jumping, and doing all those things that we want kids to be able to do,” explained Dr. Leanne Ward, a co-researcher in the STAR Program.

The hope is that the partnership, the first of its kind outside of Quebec, is just the beginning.

“I think as we work together, we’ll continue to find ways to capitalize on the expertise in each of the spots to build programs that serve these kids with the very rare genetic bone disorders and to advance research,” said Craig Campbell, the chair of the department of pediatrics at LHSC.

“This is just the beginning of so much more to come. And really, partnering just makes you better. It’s that synergistic effect of bringing great minds together to optimize clinical care and bring the research to the bedside much more quickly,” concluded Thorstad.