Dr. William Hogg was appointed DFM Eminent Scientist in February 2023. Key elements of Dr. Hogg’s mandate include being the Scientific Advisor to the Senior Leadership Team, facilitating and fostering collaborations between early and mid-career researchers and national and international senior researchers, establishing collaborations with provincial, national and international primary care research organizations, as well as providing research mentoring to promote resident and faculty scholarship. You can reach Dr. W. Hogg at whogg@uOttawa.ca.

Dr. Douglas Archibald, Associate Professor and Director of Research and Innovation at the Department of Family Medicine, developed a virtual reality experience to help faculty members and students learn about stress and anxiety. This work was supported by an eCampus Ontario grant. Supported by a grant from the Government of Alberta, Dr. Archibald further tailored the experience to teach first responders and emergency health care workers about strategies to help self-manage post-traumatic stress injuries. His team is looking to expand their reach and translate the virtual reality experience for use in Francophone communities. In 2022, Dr. Archibald joined teams that received two SSHRC Insight Grants to work with a multidisciplinary team to explore the development of educational activities focused on post-colonial practices in education as well as to examine how the professional identity of nurse practitioners and family physicians is (re)constructed by their work experiences in a primary care setting.

Long waiting lists, physician shortages and language barriers are among the many obstacles patients face in getting a doctor. In response to these challenges, Dr. Lise Bjerre, Associate Professor and Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa and the Institut du Savoir Montfort, and her team have developed an online tool to make it easier for patients to find a family doctor who speaks their own language and is located close to their home. Funded in part by the Ontario SPOR Support Unit Francophone Initiative (IF-COFFRE), Docmapper.ca, and “trouvezunmedecin.ca” is a free and secure online tool consisting of an interactive map that lists the names, practice contact information and language skills of community-based family physicians in the Ottawa and Renfrew County area. The platform lists physicians who speak over 50 languages within this area. This provides an integrated geographic and language directory of family physicians in the region.

Dr. Marie-Hélène Chomienne, Associate Professor and Research Chair in International Francophonie, recently travelled to Benin where she participated in the delivery of a training workshop for health care providers on infection prevention and ethics, a project led by Dr. Jean Roy and funded by Fondation Mérieux. Dr. Chomienne’s group offered training on infection prevention, viral hepatitis, antibiotic prophylaxis, professionalism, ethics, and interprofessional collaboration. The group was composed of three family physicians, Dr. Jean Roy, Dr. Maude Perras, Dr. Marie-Hélène Chomienne, a clinical nurse specialized in infection prevention, Muleka Ngenda Muadi, and the program evaluator, Maud Meddiel, a doctoral student at the Faculty of Education, not to mention the 25 learners!

Dr. Simone Dahrouge, Associate Professor, is the Director of OPEN (Ottawa Practise Enhancement Network), one of 14 Canadian primary care-based learning networks which bring together nearly 2,000 primary care providers who help advance our understanding of primary care and engage in quality improvement (QI) efforts. OPEN offers our region’s primary care sector mentorship and educational opportunities for QI. This past year, OPEN partnered with Ontario-MD and our faculty’s Continuing Professional Development office to deliver a highly successful 9-hour QI experiential workshop to nearly 200 Ontario physicians, most of whom were completing their CPSO QI certification. OPEN is also part of a national collaboration led by Dr. Andrew Pinto (University of Toronto) which received $10 million in CIHR funding in 2022 to establish a national platform for primary care clinical trials and establish its first trial, a comparative study of COVID-19 therapeutics. 

Did you know that Neighbours who share the same family physician have better health care outcomes? Dr. William Hogg, Full Professor, published “Patient clustering in primary care settings” in the Canadian Family Physician Journal in September 2022. The peer-reviewed article describes a previously unrecognized mechanism, focusing on social connectedness and the diffusion of information, which helps explain the remarkable effectiveness of primary care practitioners. The Canadian Primary Care Information Network (CPIN) is central to Dr. Hogg’s research program and to building infrastructure to facilitate digital communication between family physicians and interdisciplinary team members with their patients. 

Dr. Sharon Johnston, Associate Professor and Scientific Director at the Institut du Savoir Montfort, continues to lead a team constantly pushing to understand more and advance new approaches across a series of research projects, some new and some ongoing.  Co-founder of the Canadian Primary Care Information Network (CPIN), and in collaboration with Dr. William Hogg and the team, they have engaged primary care practices across the country in sending automated digital patient messages on a range of health promotion topics and vaccine education. They helped these practices collect PREMs and PROMs (patient-reported experience measures and patient-reported outcome measures) and are aggregating patients’ reported data and feedback across practices to amplify patients' voices and the learning across these diverse medical homes. With feedback from primary care providers and their patients, they are improving digital patient education through message content, format and response rate, to make this an increasingly effective patient engagement tool. 

Dr. Claire Kendall is an Associate Professor and Clinical Research Chair in Strengthening Primary Care for Integrated Health Equity.  Her research program focuses on primary care equity in ways that incorporate community and patient engagement to address social determinants of health. Research highlights in 2022 include: a $1M CIHR award to study the impact of community-campus engagement on population health; launching CityStudio Ottawa, a partnership between uOttawa and the City of Ottawa comprising projects to address the city’s Community Safety and Well-Being Plan priorities; funding from CIHR for a collaborative project with the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study to incorporate existing housing datasets into neighbourhood profiles; and developing intersectional models of COVID positivity in Ontario using health administrative data, including co-establishment of a Patient Advisory Committee of people living with long COVID. 

Dr. Clare Liddy, Full Professor, Chair of the Department of Family Medicine and University of Ottawa Research Chair in eConsult and Primary Health Care Delivery, leads the seminal body of work in the field of electronic consultations (eConsult), which has had a marked impact on health services delivery locally and nationally. She is the Primary Care Lead for the award-winning Champlain eConsult BASE™ service and the Co-Executive Director of the Ontario eConsult Centre of Excellence, which is managing the expansion of eConsult across Ontario. In 2022, funded by the University of Ottawa Brain and Mind Research Institute, Dr. Liddy began to examine how eConsult is used for patients with dementia. Dr. Liddy’s team continues to work on two CIHR funded grants that examine the impact of eConsult on patients with frailty and how to improve access to care for patients with chronic pain.

Dr. Frank Knoefel is an Associate Professor and University of Ottawa Brain and Mind – Bruyère Research Institute Chair in Primary Health Care Dementia Research. His research continues to focus on smart home technology to facilitate aging in place and assessing driving risk in the context of aging and cognitive decline. This year, the Virage driving simulator arrived and work has begun on collecting normative data. His next project is to examine the impact of chronic atrial fibrillation on cognition and driving ability. Dr. Knoefel continues in his role as Challenge Area Lead in Cognitive Health & Dementia at the AGE-WELL NCE Inc., and he is leading the writing of a book on supportive smart homes. 

Dr. Doug Manuel, Full Professor and Clinical Research Chair in Precision Medicine for Chronic Disease Prevention, leads a 4-year team grant for personalized health at end-of-life from the Canadian Institute for Health Research. Investigators are from five uOttawa faculties. Dr. Manuel, Scientist, at The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, leads a new artificial intelligence hub funded by TD Bank. The AI Hub recently supported Dr. Manish Sood and other investigators in publishing an algorithm to predict chronic kidney disease based on preventable risks. The new chronic kidney disease calculator is available on projectbiglife.ca. New dietary calculators will be available shortly on the website. Dr. Manuel remains active with the Covid-19 pandemic. He leads an international, multidisciplinary effort to develop an evaluation framework for wastewater-based surveillance and a separate project that developed the Public Health Environmental Surveillance Open Data Model used worldwide to support wastewater-based surveillance and research.  

Dr. David Ponka, Full Professor and Director of The Besrour Centre for Global Family Medicine, has been working with partners from around the world to build primary care capacity in emerging settings. Its reach now extends to over 40 countries on all continents and its institutional partners include the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) and the WHO. In conjunction with these partners, in 2022, the Centre launched the FM VAX research project, funded by the International Primary Health Care Research Consortium. This survey of over 500 primary care providers around the world confirmed that systems that integrate primary care and public health have more efficient COVID-19 vaccine delivery programs.

Dr. Kamila Premji, Assistant Professor and Junior Clinical Research Chair in Family Medicine, led and collaborated on studies finding a declining proportion of family physicians are practicing comprehensiveness; 1.7 million Ontarians have a family physician who is 65 years or older and poised to retire; 24% more Ontarians are now without a family physician compared to 2020; and patient attachment rates to primary care plateaued in concert with government policies limiting entry into team-based and capitation models of care. In addition to presenting at peer-reviewed conferences, she has advocated for solutions by engaging stakeholders such as the Ontario Ministry of Health, the Ontario College of Family Physicians, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, and the Ontario Medical Association. She has also leveraged social media and other prominent platforms to engage the public, including CBC’s The National, CBC’s Cross-Country Checkup, CTV News, the Globe & Mail, and the Ottawa Citizen.

Dr. Rohit Gandhi, Lecturer and a recipient of the DFM New Innovator Award, is leading two research projects at l’Hôpital Montfort, working with several students and DFM residents, providing them opportunity and exposure to research. His research is focused on building an audit and feedback scorecard for emergency departments and developing consensus-based metrics relating to physician productivity. Dr. Gandhi has also been collaborating as a site investigator with a large project on novel oral anticoagulants (NOACs) through McMaster and with his DFM colleague, Dr. Pil Joo, regarding predictors of propofol sedation in the emergency room. This past year he was published in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine (CJEM) as the first author on a study regarding reducing low-value testing in primary care, and was part of a BMJ Quality and Safety Publication on the Economic evaluations of audit and feedback interventions.

Dr. Kheira Jolin-Dahel, Assistant Professor, with the continued support of a DFM New Innovator Award and PRIME Grant, continued her work on the development of a tool to predict birth outcomes using the BORN database. The data analysis is now complete, and the manuscript is in development. As a FMRSP supervisor, Dr. Jolin-Dahel is proud of her residents’ achievements: Dr. Francis Lebrun, whose QI project for his work on missed fractures ranked second best, and Drs. Camille Cusson-Dufour and Emilie Langlois, whose project on the accuracy of ultrasound dating in pregnancy, won best primary research award study at RIO Day in 2022 and has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada (JOGC).

Dr. Courtney Maskerine, Assistant Professor, and the latest recipient of the DFM New Innovator Award, has taken a position as a Research Fellow at The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in the Health Evaluation and Liveliness for Physicians through Meaningful Data (HELP MD) program. She is exploring factors associated with physician well-being with the goal of informing policies to support physician health, as well as investigating the role of physician health on physician practice patterns and patient care.

With the continued support of the DFM New Innovator Award, Dr. Daniel Myran and his team published several studies using health administrative data to track the effects of substance use policy and the COVID-19 pandemic on alcohol and drug harms in Canada. Dr. Myran, a fellow at OHRI, led a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2022, which found that there was over a 6-fold increase in hospitalizations for unintentional cannabis poisoning among children under the age of 10 following the legalization of non-medical cannabis in Canada. He also published a study in JAMA Network Open showing a 27% increase in rates of physician outpatient visits for mental health and substance use in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These studies have fostered discussions on these important health issues and have resulted in meaningful engagement with individuals and organizations involved in physician health and Government stakeholders in charge of cannabis regulation.  

Dr. Parisa Rezaiefar, Assistant Professor and recipient of the DFM New Innovator Award and PRIME grant, is leading a program of research and innovation in creating strategies to teach gynecological procedures and measuring the outcome of these teaching strategies. In 2022, she completed the nationally agreed-upon content for instructional videos for four gynecological procedures in family medicine and used this nationally developed content to create 12 instructional videos for gynecological procedures in primary care that can be accessed on YouTube. Dr. Rezaiefar also validated the performance rating instruments called Procedure Specific Checklists (PSC) and Global Rating Scales (GRS). The results of this work were presented at the 50th Annual Meeting, North American Primary Care Research Group in Phoenix, Arizona, and at the Family Medicine Forum in Toronto, Ontario. These performance rating instruments can now be accessed online and are used to provide specific formative feedback to learners.  

Dr. Barbara Farrell, Assistant Professor, and her deprescribing guidelines research team, were busy again in 2022. Dr. Farrell was the keynote speaker at the United States Deprescribing Research Network annual meeting in Orlando in May. She helped plan and presented at the International Conference on Deprescribing in Denmark in September. She also spoke at a number of conferences, including the Choosing Wisely Conference, AdvantAge Ontario Conference, Health Services Research and Pharmacy Practice Conference and the European Society of Clinical Pharmacy Special Interest Group on Deprescribing. She published multiple papers in 2022, ending the year as the recipient of the University of Toronto Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy Hall of Distinction Alumni Award.   

Dr. Peggy Kleinplatz, Full Professor, has provided evidence as to why women stopped menstruating upon arrival at Nazi death camps. She has published “Women’s Experiences of Infertility After the Holocaust” in the journal Social Science & Medicine, providing evidence that infertility was forced on women without their knowledge, certainly without informed consent, and no attention nor investigation was conducted about their experiences in the 75 years after the Holocaust. Her work has attracted scientific and media attention internationally, including a 2022 TikTok video receiving over 3M views in the first week it was published, and it continues to trend.   

Dr. Maddie Venables, Academic Research Advisor at the Department of Family Medicine, is working closely with health leaders and Indigenous community members to dismantle anti-Indigenous racism in health care systems. In 2022, the team received a Telfer School of Management Indigenous Research Support grant, and a Department of Family Medicine PRIME Staff grant, to support the development of an anti-racism assessment tool for medical education curricula. She has co-authored a chapter in the book “Leading under Pressure” which explores equity, diversity, and inclusion considerations for leadership in medical education. Dr. Venables co-led a workshop on “Disparities by Design: Addressing Racism in Indigenous Health” at the 10^th Anniversary National Conference of the First Nations Health Managers Association.   

Dr. Anna Wilkinson, Associate Professor, edits and writes the quarterly Oncology Briefs Series in the Canadian Family Physician, an initiative which she spearheaded to ensure Canada's Family Physicians have adequate education in cancer care. She also works in partnership with Statistics Canada, applying Canadian Cancer Registry data to optimize cancer screening practices in Canada. She has created the ‘Survivor Advisor’ in partnership with Thrive Health. The Survivor Advisor is a customizable evidence-based digital tool for breast cancer survivors which enables self-management and optimizes survivorship care. The Advisor screens for recurrence and side effects from treatment and sends reminders for recommended follow-up investigations and health promotion. The digital tool also contains a resource library of information to assist patients to understand and self-manage side effects. The Survivor Advisor presents an innovative means to assist with system capacity issues while simultaneously improving communication and information flow between providers and patients. The Survivor Advisor is being piloted in partnership with The Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation.