Awardees

Supervisors: Dr. Sharon Straus and Dr. Brenda Hemmelgarn
Award: KRESCENT Fellowship
Institution: St. Michael's Hospital
Year: 2013-2015

Dr. Meghan Elliott will complete her post-doctoral fellowship under the supervision of Dr. Sharon Straus and Dr. Brenda Hemmelgarn at the University of Toronto. Her project will focus on the integration and prioritization of recommendations in practice guidelines. Dr. Elliott obtained her M.D. at Queen’s University and completed her internal medicine and nephrology residencies at the University of Calgary.

General practitioners have only 6 to 9 minutes on average to spend with a patient, limiting the time available to address all the recommendations provided in practice guidelines. As a result, patients with chronic or complex conditions often don’t receive appropriate care. The aim of Dr. Elliott’s research is to understand how physicians and patients prioritize guideline recommendations and how physicians implement them in their practice.

This research will be performed within a scientific area called Knowledge Translation (KT) that aims to incorporate current research and recommendations into the delivery of high-quality patient care. Findings will support the design of tools that formally test how physicians prioritize recommendations given to patients and lead to improved health care delivery for patients with chronic diseases. The ultimate goal of Dr. Elliott’s research is the development of an approach that integrates patient priorities with those of health care providers, thereby optimizing patient care.