VCU Introduces Online Women’s Health Research Resources

By Sue Robinson
VCU Libraries

Virginia Commonwealth University is bolstering its mission of research, patient care and education through a new website that focuses on critical women’s health research being conducted on campus.

The VCU Women’s Health Research site, which can be found at http://portal.womenshealth.vcu.edu, features news about women’s health studies, profiles on the researchers and links to consumer health information for lay readers.  

The project was funded by the National Library of Medicine, one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The site was developed in partnership with the VCU Institute for Women’s Health and Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences, in collaboration with VCU Public Affairs.

“The new portal will help us to be a better resource for researchers pursuing projects in women’s health and sex differences, and will also allow us to increase the visibility of our researchers and research projects to a broader audience,” said Susan G. Kornstein, executive director of the Institute for Women’s Health and professor of psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology.

VCU was a natural choice for a project that knits scholarship with consumer education, said Teresa L. Knott, director of the Tompkins-McCaw Library, which partnered with the Institute of Women’s Health for the website project

“We have a well-respected Institute for Women’s Health (IWH) and an outstanding consumer health library, the VCU Community Health Educations Center (CHEC),” she said.

“The National Library of Medicine looks to academic communities such as ours to form these types of meaningful partnerships to share research and information,” Knott said. “With growing emphasis on interdisciplinary work, academic health sciences libraries are positioned at the nexus of disciplines and can play a core role in connecting and collaborating with researchers across disciplines.”

Visitors to the Women’s Health Resources site will find:

• Biographies of researchers that list specialties and current areas of research interest;
  
  
• Articles on current research, ranging from how health disparities in racial and ethnic populations can affect premature births to the relationship between illness and depression as women age;
  
  
• A resource page for researchers that outlines tools and grant processes supporting research that are available through the VCU Institute for Women’s Health and the VCU Center for Clinical and Translational Research;
  
  
• Links to consumer health information maintained by the Community Health Education Center — one of the few such centers in the nation, a partnership between an academic health sciences library and a teaching hospital;
  
  
• Connections to current clinical trials and patient information for women wanting appointments at VCU’s groundbreaking women’s health center at Stony Point.

Knott said the project is also an opportunity to raise awareness about the VCU Community Health Education Center. This consumer health center broadly expanded its postings on women’s health as part of the project.  See this guide. http://guides.library.vcu.edu/womens-consumer-health

The new portal also features a resource page for a continuing education credit course for researchers and health care professionals, “The Science of Sex and Gender in Human Health,” which was developed by the National Institutes of Health.  

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VCU is a recognized leader in women's health research.

“We have many internationally known researchers at VCU, in areas ranging from premature birth to polycystic ovary syndrome to psychiatric genetics,” Kornstein said. “We have a ‘one-stop shopping’ multidisciplinary women’s health center at Stony Point that has won national awards and has been a model for many other women’s health centers around the country and even across the globe. The Journal of Women’s Health is edited here at VCU, and we put on an Annual Congress on Women’s Health that educates 1,000 health care practitioners per year from across the US and abroad.  

“And we host an annual VCU Women’s Health Research Day, where we bring together VCU investigators, students and community partners to share their work with one another and foster interdisciplinary research collaborations. Because of our leadership in women’s health, VCU was designated as a National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services a decade ago. We’ve been building momentum ever since.”
 
The new portal reflects the heightened focus on research at VCU in recent years. The university, which garnered more than $255 million in sponsored research funding in 2011, is one of only 28 public universities in the United States to receive Carnegie Foundation rankings in both research and community engagement.

The vision for the pioneering Institute for Women’s Health, founded in 1999, has grown as the university’s research imprint has deepened.

“We have greatly expanded the research arm of the institute over the past several years, with the goal of building interdisciplinary research at VCU in women’s health and sex differences,” Kornstein said.

VCU received a $20 million Clinical and Translational Science Award from NIH three years ago, and women’s health is one of the focus areas.

“We have added many new research faculty members, new research development groups and new areas of focus for grant submissions,” Kornstein said. “For example, we were recently funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a Gates Grand Challenge Explorations grant focused on preventing the progression of HIV in women in Mali, Africa and another grant funded by Pfizer on stroke prevention in women in primary care.”  


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