Think Global Fund Report 2024 - University of Toronto
In June 2024, Dr Freda Mold visited the University of Toronto as part of a project titled 'International knowledge exchange regarding virtual consultations for people with learning disabilities and their families in primary and community care'. Here, she shares her account of the visit.
I participated in an international knowledge exchange visit, funded by the Think Global fund, at the University of Toronto's Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation during the week commencing 24 June 2024. This visit included several meetings and presentations with academics and healthcare professionals, providing a platform to connect with researchers engaged in similar projects and to establish collaborative relationships for future research and publications.
The first meeting was with Yona Lunsky (University of Toronto (UoT)/Department of Psychiatry, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)) and Avra Selick (Azrieli Adult Neurodevelopmental Centre, CAMH) to talk about their research, which aligns with my current research at Surrey (Virtual consultations for people with learning disabilities, their families and healthcare providers: A co-design study). We discussed commonalities in project findings and I learnt about the evaluation of the team’s outputs in practice. This learning will inform the next stages of my work. I plan to meet up with the team at the forthcoming 17th World Congress of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, which is taking place in Chicago (5–8 August 2024) to continue discussions about future research.
The second meeting (and presentation) was held with David Wiljer from the Connected Care Team at University Health Network (UHN), Faculty of Medicine (UoT), where I shared an overview of the research being undertaken at the Digital Health Cluster in the School of Health Sciences at Surrey, and my own research interests (access to primary/community health care via virtual consultations and chatbots).
As a postraduate research director in the School of Health Sciences, I also met PGRs and ECRs to talk about their research interests and their experiences of being a PGR, exploring differences between PhD programmes and research challenges. Throughout this event, we identified a lot of shared research interests, and as such David and I are in discussions about the possibility of a virtual seminar between the UHN Connected Care Team and Surrey’s Digital Health Cluster. Finally, we also talked about the possibility of future reciprocal visits, by our Canadian partners, so the School of Health Sciences/PGRs and students can benefit from their learning/research.
The third meeting was with Quynh Pham from the Centre for Digital Therapeutics (UHN), in which we discussed a comparison of healthcare delivery between the UK and Canada, and Toronto residents specifically.
The final meeting and webinar were with Carolyn Steele Gray and her team at the Science of Care Institute (UoT) at the Hennrick Bridgepoint Hospital, which is part of the Sinai Health site. Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital focuses exclusively on research, care and teaching, and specialises in complex health conditions. Although a largely new building, parts of the hospital used to be a prison (see photo on the right). The meeting and webinar provided the opportunity to meet academic colleagues within the Bridgepoint Collaboratory for Research and Innovation, in the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, and talk about digital health to support integrated care, person-centred care delivery for people with complex care needs and studies employing co-design methods as applied to health services research.
