Associate Professor, School of Nursing, UNBC
Family Nurse Practitioner, Northern Health
Clinical Faculty, Department of Family Practice, UBC
Please describe your most important contribution(s) to primary care research
My work focuses on primary health care delivery in rural settings. I’m interested to connect clinical practice to the broader organizational environment to inform changes to process, structures or systems to improve delivery of primary health care. My work help helped support integration of NPs into the health system, advanced understanding of interprofessional team-based primary care in rural communities, including virtual teams, and promotes equity-oriented approaches in health care settings.
Please describe your current work or upcoming research projects related to primary care
Current work includes leading a retrospective chart review of non-fatal overdose and care leading to discharge in an emergency department setting to explore how emergency and community care can best support patients after an overdose in a northern setting. Other work continues to examine rural primary care teams and the ways in which they are educated, remunerated and integrated impacts patient and health system outcomes.
What are the key messages from your primary care research to share with other stakeholders (e.g. clinicians, policymakers, patients)
- Rural communities can be exemplars of transdisciplinary and intersectoral work. (Partnering for Change study). Creating time and space for teams to safely surface tensions and get to know one another can speed things up later in a change process by helping people to focus on the same priorities at the same time (Partnering for Change study).
- Baseline staffing may be required prior to being able to successfully implement some changes (EQUIP ED study, Partnering for Change study).
- Team-based care models that reinforce gate-keeping practices can be confusing to patients. (Cancer care coordination study).
- Leaving patients to coordinate their own care can be exhausting and impacts their agency. (OAT engagement study).
- Virtual care can shift the locus of power in a patient-provider encounter (Virtual kidney care study).
- Goal-oriented care supports patient agency and team-based care (OAT engagement study).
BC Primary Health Care Research Network 