Biography

Lindsay Hedden, PhD, is an applied health services researcher and Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar. She is also the Scientific Director of the BC SUPPORT Unit, and a principal investigator for the Health Systems Research Lab. As a post-doctoral Health System Impact Fellow, she worked with BC’s Ministry of Health on an improved strategy for physician workforce planning, supporting physician recruitment and retention efforts, and the development and evaluation of new models of primacy care delivery. Dr. Hedden completed a previous post-doctoral fellowship with the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation. She has a PhD in Population and Public Health, and Master of Science in Epidemiology from the University of British Columbia, and an Honours Bachelor of Science in Health Studies from the University of Waterloo. She currently serves as the Treasurer on the Board of Directors for the Justice Emmett Hall Memorial Foundation. She joined the Faculty of Health Sciences in 2020.

Research Interests

Dr. Hedden’s past and current work has involved exploring the drivers of and solutions to the primary care access crisis with a particular focus on communities experiencing marginalization. She has also worked to identify and address gaps in health system data use and data infrastructure, and has studied the impact of those gaps on primary care accessibility and workforce planning. She has explored, using physician billings, why the availability of community-based primary care has declined, despite substantial increases in the number of primary care physicians per capita. Other current work addresses the rapid shift to the use of virtual care, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic; measuring current and predicting future health system capacity and demand; and examining the effects of the increasing corporatization and privatization of primary care on equity, accessibility, and quality of care. Her work is grounded in partnerships with the BC Ministry of Health, regional health authorities, health care professionals and patients.

Current research covers three related areas:

1. The increasing role of virtual care in the context of primary care, including implications for costs, service volumes (based on the degree to which virtual care duplicates or is a substitute for in-office visits), accessibility and continuity of care.
2. The extent and effects of the increasing corporatization and privatization of Canada’s health care system primary care on equity, accessibility, and quality of care.
3. Interdisciplinary team-based models of primary care practice and planning.

This program of work uses a variety of observational research designs and data sources, including secondary use of population-based administrative data, primary data collection using surveys and interviews of patients and health care professionals, and policy and document analysis.

Teaching Interests

Canadian and comparative health policy; health services research; learning health systems; observational research design; secondary data use.

Publications

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=TIe8O1EAAAAJ&hl=en