March2023-Research and Academics Plan
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Dr. Bernard Le Foll
Vice-President Research and
Academics and Chief Scientific Officer |
Research & Academics Plan
Advance Waypoint’s system leadership through research and academics
There is a strong desire and aspiration to see Waypoint become a centre of excellence in research and academics. Our Research and Academics plan builds a strong foundation for Waypoint’s collaborative leadership in the health system by evolving from a research institute within a hospital to a model where the hospital is the research institute - where inquiry, evidence, and care are seamlessly integrated. As we embrace a ‘Waypoint without walls’, this concept is inclusive of work we do in the community and through partnerships.
Enhancing the integration of research, knowledge mobilization, and education as part of our evolution into a learning health system will see us developing and applying clinical outcome indicators from the ground up to improve care delivery, inform policy and support our quality improvement initiatives.
Expanding partnerships between the Waypoint Research Institute and other academic partners, including mental health partner hospitals, will leverage the strengths of each organization involved to achieve our shared purpose of providing innovative and evidence-based care, and will help ensure we have the appropriate infrastructure and supports in place to be successful. There is an opportunity and need to fully integrate research across the organization, to support and enhance clinical and system transformation efforts both within and outside our walls.
We will continue to build the organization’s infrastructure and capacity to
conduct patient/client-oriented and clinical research. Patient/client-oriented research is about engaging patients/clients and families as partners in the research process to ensure that studies focus on patient/client-identified priorities, which ultimately lead to better patient/client outcomes.
We will become a national and global leader in forensic mental health research. Since Waypoint is the only high secure forensic mental health program in the province and has a rich history of research in forensic psychiatry, the organization is uniquely positioned to lead forensic mental health research on a national and global scale. Waypoint has made a historic $1M investment in our first funded research chair position, in partnership with the University of Toronto, to enable a leap forward in forensic mental health sciences, including by developing national and international collaborations, producing high-impact publications and presentations, and fostering collaborations within the academic milieu of the Waypoint Research Institute. This plan pushes us to build on our knowledge and expertise advancing the delivery of safe and effective care to this highly specialized and unique population.
We will strengthen the academic learner portfolio by expanding and optimizing our participation in professional education to prepare our current and future workforce to better meet patient/client and population needs.
Over the next three years, we want to become more intentional about partnering across and beyond the organization to support the uptake of evidence-based practice as well as the evaluation of our care improvement efforts. This approach encourages inquiry right at the point of care delivery, and encourages us as researchers to fully immerse ourselves in the field. The existing arrangement of our high secure provincial forensic clinical units creates a natural opportunity for randomized clinical trials exploring the real-world effectiveness of treatments and quality improvement and patient and staff safety interventions. This will demonstrate the impact of our research and teaching and spur new and exciting collaborations that could produce better outcomes for our patients/clients.
To read more about our Enabling Plans, please click here.