Grants We Funded
Grant applicants for the 2023 cycle requested a total of nearly $4 million dollars. The PSF Study Section Subcommittees of Basic & Translational Research and Clinical Research evaluated nearly 140 grant applications on the following topics:
The PSF awarded research grants totaling over $1 million dollars to support nearly 30 plastic surgery research proposals.
ASPS/PSF leadership is committed to continuing to provide high levels of investigator-initiated research support to ensure that plastic surgeons have the needed research resources to be pioneers and innovators in advancing the practice of medicine.
Research Abstracts
Search The PSF database to have easy access to full-text grant abstracts from past PSF-funded research projects 2003 to present. All abstracts are the work of the Principal Investigators and were retrieved from their PSF grant applications. Several different filters may be applied to locate abstracts specific to a particular focus area or PSF funding mechanism.
Hospital Factors Impacting the Quality of Plastic Surgical Care
Catherine Curtin MD
2012
Stanford University
Pilot Research Grant
Hand or Upper Extremity, Other
There has been a strong national push to improve health care quality. However plastic surgery care has not been systematically reviewed. This project plans to look at factors impacting the quality of plastic surgery by assessing what hospital characteristics are associated with better outcomes. We will study three index plastic surgical procedures: cleft palate repair, autologous breast reconstruction, and digit replantation. These procedures represent a broad spectrum of the plastic surgery field and also require a hospital stay. Our analysis will assess for associations between hospital factors and the following quality indicators: mortality, length of stay (LOS), and inpatient complications rates. We will utilize data from the health care utilization project (HCUP) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) to run models looking at what hospital factors are associated with our quality indicators for each index procedure from a national perspective. Our secondary aim is to examine if volume is associated with shorter LOS, lower mortality, and lower complications for our index procedures. Hospital volume has been found to be associated with better quality for several surgical procedures leading to the implementation of high volume centers. Yet this is not true for every surgical technique. We will use our HCUP data to compile a dataset of our index procedures. We will then use the AHA ID number to calculate annual volume for each index procedure for each hospital and assess if high volume hospitals are associated with shorter LOS or lower complication rate.
Catherine Curtin, MD is an Assistant Professor of the Division of Plastic Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, CA and staff physician at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She received her medical degree from Yale University, completed her plastic surgery residency at the University of Michigan and completed a clinical research fellowship through Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars program. She continued her training as a hand fellow at Stanford University. Dr. Curtin is board certified in plastic surgery by the American Board of Plastic Surgery. She has also received a Certificate of Added Qualifications in Hand Surgery. Dr. Curtin received a four-year career development award from the Veterans Affairs Research and Development. She has published multiple articles and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Hand Surgery. Dr. Curtin’s academic pursuits have focused on clinical research using administrative data to improve quality and access to surgical care.