Leveraging Team-Based Care Strengths in Canada and the USA: Opportunities to Learn About, From and With Each Other

Wednesday May 28, 2025 8:00 - 9:30 CDT

Lynne Sinclair profile pic
Lynne Sinclair
Lynne Sinclair is a Physical Therapist and the Senior Consultant: Partnerships & Innovation at the Centre for Advancing Collaborative Healthcare & Education (CACHE), University of Toronto (UT).  She holds an Assistant Professor appointment with the Department of Physical Therapy, Temerty Faculty of Medicine at UT.  Lynne was one of the founding leaders that helped create the UT Centre for IPE in 2009 and one of the original faculty developers of the ehpic™(Educating Health Professionals in Interprofessional Care) program in 2005.  Lynne has been honoured with multiple awards for teaching and health care education excellence and from 2017-2024 she was appointed an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia. She also served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative (CIHC) from 2018-2024.   Lynne just completed the role of interprofessional theme co-lead ($1.1 million of $45 million total) for a project entitled Team Primary Care: Training for Transformation funded by Employment and Social  Development Canada. Lynne is passionate about supporting leaders and teams at the interface between practice and education. 
Alan Dow profile pic
Alan Dow
Alan Dow, MD, MSHA is a general internist and a tenured professor of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. As division chief for hospital medicine, he oversees a team of over 100 physicians and advanced practice providers who provide the majority of inpatient medical care and education at his institution’s flagship academic center and a small, rural community hospital. These settings help him understands the complex needs of both tertiary care and underserved communities. Concurrently, he leads VCU Health Continuing Education which credits thousands of hours of continuing education programs for healthcare practitioners each year. In 2011, he founded the Center for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Care at VCU which, under his leadership, provided educational programs to over 2500 learners annually. In all of these roles, he has sought to translate the health needs defined by his patients and the community into high-quality educational and clinical programs that advance health services and improve health. Alan attended medical school at Washington University and completed residency in internal medicine and a health administration degree at VCU.
Linda Woodhouse profile pic
Linda Woodhouse

Dr. Linda Woodhouse has an international reputation with over 35 years of experience as a clinician, educator and researcher. In Canada, she taught at University of Toronto and McMaster University (Ontario) before moving to Alberta to serve as the inaugural David Magee Endowed Chair in Physical Therapy (2011-2016) , Scientific Director for Alberta Health Services’ Provincial Bone & Joint Health Strategic Clinical Network (2012-2015). She has made significant contributions to physiotherapy and exercise science, including being elected to the Board of Directors of the Canadian Physiotherapy Association (CPA) in 2012 where she served as President of the CPA from 2015 to 2017 and as Vice Chair of the Physiotherapy Education Accreditation Council (PEAC).  In Australia, she was Head of the School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science (2019-2021) at Curtin University before returning to North America as the Director of Research and Faculty Development for Tufts University’s Doctorate of Physical Therapy (DPT) program (Phoenix, Arizona).  Since September 2024, Linda is Professor and Chair at Creighton University’s DPT program in Omaha, Nebraska.

She has held or collaborated on over $30 million in peer-reviewed grants, has published widely and has many invited presentations as an international speaker. Her research has focused on evaluating pain, physical and functional capacity in individuals with musculoskeletal and endocrine disorders, including the effects of muscle compounds and exercise on sarcopenia.  Linda has contributed to the development of a competency profile for entry-to-practice and advanced practice physical therapists and remains an advocate for integrated data systems and the use of data to drive high-quality, cost-effective health care delivery.

 

One of the underlying themes of CAB is to explore how Canadians and Americans can learn about, from and with each other to improve team-based care in our collective communities. We know that collaborative, interprofessional, data-driven, healthcare teams deliver more patient-responsive care that results in improved patient and health systems outcomes.1,2  Despite this, practitioners across both countries traverse different local and national policy landscapes that shape care and may help or hinder team-based care.

In this plenary session we will describe key characteristics and structures of the American and Canadian healthcare systems, including how they enable or impede implementation of team-based care. We will illustrate different exemplars of interprofessional practice and discuss their application in various healthcare settings and sectors in both Canada and the USA.  As successful examples and lessons learned are shared, so too will ‘myths’ about the American and Canadian healthcare systems be dispelled.  Notably, we will outline various facilitators to successful implementation of interprofessional teamwork and identify strategies to overcome challenges related to the wise practices necessary for effective and efficient team-based care.

Learning Objectives

This plenary session will:

  1. Describe how local and national policy and practices shape the key characteristics and structures of the American and Canadian healthcare systems and how these influence approaches to interprofessional team-based care across sectors and settings.
  2. Analyze successful examples of high-functioning teams that prioritize patient needs and outcomes as the central driver of interprofessional collaboration in the USA and Canada.
  3. Discuss lessons learned and identify strategies to overcome challenges/ failures in implementing models for team-based care.
  4. Provide participants with actionable strategies that they can directly apply to their work as practitioners or educators.
References
  • Webster, CS et al. Interprofessional Learning in Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teams Is Associated With Reduced Patient Mortality: A Quantitative Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Journal of Patient Safety 20(1):p 57-65, January 2024. | DOI: 10.1097/PTS.0000000000001170
  • Webster, CS et al. Interprofessional Learning in Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teams Is Associated With Reduced Patient Mortality: A Quantitative Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Journal of Patient Safety 20(1):p 57-65, January 2024. | DOI: 10.1097/PTS.0000000000001170