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Mental Health for Healthcare Workers: Steps to Solutions
March 22, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
On Wednesday, March 22, join the University of Toronto’s health-faculties for a live virtual event on Mental Health for Healthcare Workers: Steps to Solutions.
Presented by the faculties of Dentistry, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Social Work,
this panel will explore issues impacting the mental health of our health care workers and steps that can be taken to work towards sustainable solutions.
> Click here to register
A YouTube link to be provided by email ahead of event.
SPEAKERS:
Dr. Rachelle Ashcroft Moderator
Associate Professor, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
Cross-appointed to the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Rachelle Ashcroft joined the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work in 2016 as an Assistant Professor from the School of Social Work at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. She completed the Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) post-doctoral training program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Dr. Ashcroft has >14 years of social work practice in various health care environments including community HIV and community mental health organizations. She then practiced as a social worker in Winnipeg’s Health Science Centre in trauma, psychiatry, bone marrow transplant, nephrology, and neurosurgery.
As a health system researcher, Dr. Ashcroft has particular interest in nurturing organizational and policy-contexts that support the delivery of team-based primary care, patient-centred virtual care, interprofessional collaboration, and strengthening social work practice in primary care and other healthcare settings. Dr. Ashcroft is a core-funded investigator of INSPIRE-PHC. She is also a mentor in the TUTOR-PHC program, a pan-Canadian interdisciplinary primary care research capacity-building program. TUTOR-PHC is led by 30 mentors from a breadth of disciplines, representing 14 universities and five provinces across Canada. In addition, Dr. Ashcroft is the Vice-President, Social and Professional Advocacy at the Ontario Association of Social Workers.
Professor Jamie Kellar
Associate Dean, Academic;
Associate Professor, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy
Professor Kellar’s clinical area of expertise is mental health and addictions. She teaches in the neuropsychiatry and health systems courses at the Faculty. Kellar has received numerous teaching awards, including an Early Career Teaching award from the University of Toronto and the National Award for Excellence in Education from the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada. She has been named Professor of the Year on three occasions. Her research is in the field of health professions education, with a specific focus on professional identity formation. She uses Foucauldian critical discourse analysis to examine dominant identity constructs in pharmacy education and practice.
Professor Elizabeth Peter
Professor, Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing
“My research focuses on examining the political dimensions of nurses’ ethical concerns and understandings.”
Dr. Elizabeth Peter’s scholarship reflects her interdisciplinary background in nursing, philosophy and bioethics. Theoretically, she locates her work in feminist health care ethics which aligns her scholarly pursuits both substantively and methodologically. She has pursued interrelated areas of scholarship, including those focusing on innovations in theory and methodology, home and community care ethics, and research ethics.
Her theoretical and methodological work is advancing the concepts of moral identity, moral agency, vulnerability, moral competency, and moral distress. She has also used metaethics to develop a critical narrative approach for qualitative research in healthcare ethics.
She is currently the Principal Investigator of a study, funded by the University of Toronto COVID-19 Action Initiative, that is exploring how to prevent and diminish the moral distress of nurses caring for patients with COVID-19.
She is also a Principal Investigator on a CIHR funded study to examine the patient, family and clinician experience from an ethical, legal, and social perspective as care transitions from hospital to home using new monitoring technology. (The SMARTVIEW, Covered: Technology Enabled remote monitoring and Self-Management – Vision for patient Empowerment following Cardiac and Vascular surgery)
She serves as an associate editor for Nursing Ethics and the vice chair of the bioethics expert panel of the American Academy of Nursing.
She is the recipient of a U of T Nursing Teaching Award for Excellence in Educational Leadership and the Christine Harrison Education Award for Integration of Theory & Practice.
Dr. Peter is the Chair of the Ethics Review Board at Public Health Ontario and a member of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at U of T.
Dr. Javed Alloo
Clinical Lead for Primary Care Integration for Practising Well, Ontario College of Family Physicians
Dr. Javed Alloo is a community based family doctor focused on helping patients and their families improve their physical and mental health in an integrated way. Recognizing that the ability to achieve better health, or provide it to others, depends on a combination of emotional, cognitive and physical resiliency, he works to support the adaptiveness of the patients, clinicians and health organizations he works with.
Dr. Alloo has retired from his family practice as of August 2022. He continues to serve the community through leadership and change management in the health care system. He is the Clinical Lead for Primary Care Integration for Practising Well at the Ontario College of Family Physicians.