Rachelle Ashcroft

• primary health care
• mental health care
• social determinants of health
• health & mental health policy
• health equity

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.

With funding from Team Primary Care, Professors Rachelle Ashcroft and Keith Adamson are leading a project that aims to strengthen the integration of social workers in primary care across Canada. Read more about their project: Creating a National Vision and Building Capacity for the Role of Social Work in Primary Care