Healthy Infants and Children's Clinical Research Program
About HICCUP
Welcome and thank you for your interest in the Healthy Infants and Children's Clinical Research Program (HICCUP).
Research is essential to improving the health and lives of children and families everywhere.
Many studies require participation from children who are healthy. Other studies compare a healthy group to one with a particular illness. These participants are called controls and they are crucial to studies exploring the causes, treatments, and outcomes of virtually all pediatric diseases. Successful control matching is a challenge for all clinical pediatric researchers but one that the community at large has the capacity to solve.
The HICCUP program will provide leading researchers and investigators with easy, equal, systematic access to healthy controls to be invited to participate in their own studies. This will drastically improve efficiencies while reducing costs, allowing researchers to be more productive and focused on the problems they are targeting. The result is the direct enhancement of all child and family health clinical research in southern Alberta, potentially serving as a model to advance such systems in other pediatric research settings.
HICCUP was designed to harness the generous and giving spirit of the southern Alberta community to overcome this problem and provide the opportunity for improved child health research. We are building a large sample of healthy children and parents willing to consider participation in healthy control research. HICCUP provides a direct opportunity for children, families, and communities to directly contribute to the advancement of research and child health in Alberta. Many families wanting to “give something back” can do so by volunteering their time to help child and community health in a positive way.
Why participate?
Find out why researchers need kids to participate in research studies and become participators! This brief video covers the basics of participating in a research study and how you could help kids all over the world.
Participators
HICCUP in the news
The HICCUP program was covered by the local news and gives families an idea of how HICCUP can help other kids and child health researchers investigating pediatric diseases.
HICCUP in the news (CTV Calgary)
If you and your family are willing to consider participation, please follow the next few simple steps. We will ask for simple personal information including your name, date of birth, brief medical history, and contact information. This information will be kept strictly confidential and carefully protected. You will be asked to provide your informed consent to be part of the HICCUP program and willingness to be contacted by investigators for invitations to participate in specific studies. Participation in HICCUP does not obligate you to participate in any actual study. Specific information will be provided and your consent will be sought by investigators for specific studies.
If you and your family would like to proceed, please click the button below for further details.
If you have any questions or concerns please contact Amalia at 403-955-2472 or email us: hiccup@ahs.ca
For Families
We are a family who would like to sign up for HICCUP to volunteer our time.
For Researchers
We are a research group who would like to apply to access the HICCUP database for study recruitment.
For Information
We have additional questions that are not answered on these pages.