HSPR Talks: Advancing Primary Care for All: Leveraging Evidence to Inform Solutions

Join us virtually!
April 23, 2025, 12:00pm - 1:30PM ET

This webinar features a cross-provincial team of researchers who will use research evidence to explore common narratives around current primary care challenges and what is contributing to them. They will consider how solutions can be implemented in ways that are consistent with best available evidence across jurisdictions. Finally, they will reflect on the evolving role of HSPR researchers in ensuring evidence-based policy as primary care receives increasing political attention.

Agnes Grudniewicz is an Associate Professor and Telfer Research Fellow in the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. She is an applied health services researcher focused on improving primary care in Canada. Her interests include interdisciplinary teams, mental illness, patients with complex care needs, practice models, and leadership. Using qualitative and mixed methods research, she explores team-based primary care and collaboration across settings and care providers. Her work aims to inform policy and improve Canadian health care systems. Agnes has a PhD in Health Services Research from the University of Toronto.

Lindsay Hedden is an Assistant Professor working in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and a Health Research BC Scholar. She leads a program of applied health services research that explores the drivers of and solutions to the primary care access crisis with a particular focus on communities experiencing marginalization. Dr. Hedden’s current projects address the rapid shift to the use of virtual care; evaluating new longitudinal, blended family physician payment models rolling out across multiple Canadian provinces; and examining the effects of the increasing corporatization and for-profit delivery of primary care on equity, accessibility, and quality of care. She has a PhD in Population and Public Health and has completed Post-Doctoral Fellowships with the BC Ministry of Health’s physician workforce planning team, and with the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation.

Ruth Lavergne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Dalhousie University and holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Primary Care. Ruth’s program of research aims to address disparities in access and build evidence to ensure primary care organization, delivery, and workforce meet the needs of Canadians now and in the future. She works with colleagues nationally to lead multi-jurisdictional, mixed methods primary care studies in collaboration with clinicians, policymakers, and patients. Ruth has a PhD in Population and Public Health from the University of British Columbia.

David Rudoler is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ontario Tech University and a Research Chair at Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences. His research interests include health human resources, specifically the supply of community-based primary and mental health services; the evaluation of policy interventions, including provider responses to payment models and incentives; the evaluation of community-based interventions for people with serious mental illness; and the application of methods in data science to issues in population health and mental health care services. David has a PhD in Health Services Research from the University of Toronto.

Maggie Keresteci is the Executive Director at CAHSPR. She is an active participant in many provincial and pan-Canadian advisory panels where she provides strategic advice on achieving integration in the health system, including insights about the importance of patient, caregiver and family partnership in research, co-design of care and clinical interactions. Throughout her career Maggie has influenced the delivery of programs and models of care, conceived of and tested health services hypotheses that led to the development of evidence driven policies and leveraged innovation to improve care. She is a volunteer Board director with Emily’s House, Toronto’s only paediatric hospice and is a member of the core group for one of the newly announced Ontario Health Teams.

Dr. Rick Glazier is Scientific Director of the Institute of Health Services and Policy Research at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and a Senior Core Scientist at ICES.  He is also a staff family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and a Scientist in its Centre for Urban Health Solutions, a Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, and Dalla Lana School of Public Health. His research interests include evaluating health system transformation, primary care health services delivery models, health of disadvantaged populations, management of chronic conditions, and population-based and geographic methods for improving equity in health.