Chair’s Column October 2025: Contributing to health systems improvement
Dear Colleagues,
Healthcare systems in Canada and around the world face immense challenges. We encounter these daily: emergency department overcrowding, long waits for specialist appointments, lack of integration across sectors, inequities in healthcare access, the opioid epidemic, and a growing underhoused population. While primary care reform is underway, it will not solve these issues without concomitant improvements across other areas of the system.
The Department of Medicine is committed to using its expertise to help identify and implement solutions. We are well-positioned to do so. Our faculty include internationally recognized experts in health services, systems, and policy who bring front-line clinical experience and deep content knowledge across a wide range of medical subspecialties. We have access to some of the most comprehensive linked population-based data sources in the world. We have strong relationships with government stakeholders and with other institutions, and many of our faculty hold leadership positions within large health systems.
To enable this work, we are launching a new University of Toronto Department of Medicine initiative in health systems research. The goal is to harness our collective expertise as clinicians, scientists, educators, and health system leaders to provide high quality scientific advice to policy makers, with the goal of improving healthcare quality, access, and sustainability. We are grateful to the McCall MacBain Foundation for providing seed funding to pilot test this work, which will begin with a few projects conducted in partnership with government agencies and other stakeholders.
As a first step, we will be creating a network of DoM faculty and trainees engaged in this area. We aim to be inclusive and welcome people working on health system improvement through research, quality improvement, education, advocacy, and other activities. If you are interested in being part of this initiative, please complete this webform or email brittany.wiwat@utoronto.ca. There will also be opportunities to serve on various committees, including those related to scientific oversight, policy, and media and communications, so please let us know if this is of interest to you.
I look forward to working with you all on this initiative, and hope that we can make meaningful contributions to optimizing our healthcare system. As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions.
Sincerely,
Moira
Dr. Moira Kapral
Sir John and Lady Eaton Professor and Chair, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto