Improving health and public policy

Our CMF Canada to UK Scholar is Dr Vivian Tam, who will be leaving Ottawa and her post as an emergency physician to undertake a Master of Public Health Policy at the University of Oxford.

 She says :” As a Canadian, the UK is a particularly salient country in which to study public policy. For one, our shared Westminster systems of parliament and publicly financed, single-payer healthcare systems lend themselves to frequent comparison. Just recently, my hospital administration shared an Economist article describing the UK’s climbing patient mortality from rising wait times in the ED, as an impetus to examine strategies for reducing our own. My experiences in the UK will allow me to learn how to credibly analyze the challenges and successes of another universal healthcare system, and how to appropriately apply lessons learned to the Canadian context.

In addition, studying at the University of Oxford would be an unrivalled opportunity to join a network of some of the brightest policy-minded leaders in the world.  This privilege will mean that, over the course of my career I will be able to debate policy alternatives, and draw on the experiences of my colleagues to challenge my thinking when confronted with policy challenges in Canada.”