Health System Impact: Being a Generalist in a Specialized World
The Canadian Health System has been slow to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Provider burnout, record level deficits in primary care, poor health outcomes compared to peer countries, and ballooning costs have combined to create a crisis. As the complexity of the health system has increased, as well as specialization within it, the emerging role of generalists in the system may be one way to reform the health system from a siloed one to a learning one.
This lecture will explore the Canadian Health System, the role of complexity and implementation in system performance, and offer real-world examples of ongoing projects to address equity of health access as part of the CIHR Health System Impact Fellowship. Emphasis on the development and refinement of ‘generalist’ skills within the system, as well as defining and exploring the term impact, will show the importance of a program like Knowledge Integration for future health researchers, clinicians, and policy-makers.
Dr. Samuel Petrie is a Health System Impact Fellow at the University of Toronto and the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, University Health Network. Originally from Halifax, he completed his BKI at the University of Waterloo in 2016, and his PhD in Health Sciences at Carleton University in 2022. His research interests include the scalability of pilot projects, the demographics of high cost health users, and the use of tele-health / eHealth technologies to better serve rural and remote communities.