Office of Spread and Scale
About Us
The Office of Spread and Scale (OSS) aims to amplify successful models of care and innovative programs beyond our hospital walls, while learning from the success of others. To achieve this goal, we conduct research, consulting, and capacity building activities related to:
- How to include principles of implementation science in your work, projects, and research grants to help you consider sustainability, spread and scale from the beginning.
- Assessing readiness for implementation and options for spread and scale, including potential barriers and enablers.
- How to consider sustainability, spread and scale within digital health evaluations.
- Strategies for encouraging and supporting patient engagement and involvement of all relevant decision makers.
- Potential ways to spread and scale your work to similar and new contexts, populations, and settings.
- How to scale successful initiatives requiring policy changes to allow for successful adoption.
Our Approach
The OSS values collaboration, health equity, and evidence-informed decision-making while prioritizing patient-oriented research and application of practices likely to achieve great impact.
Our Services
We provide coaching and consultation services for work at any stage, including providing relevant input to funding applications, factors to consider before ethics submission, implementation and dissemination strategies, and planning for next steps. We will work with you to identify a model of service that best suits your project and team needs.
These services are available to those within and outside of Women’s College Hospital. Please contact oss@wchospital.ca for details
Sample Projects
• Leading Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded planning grants to develop research questions and design scalable interventions on a variety of health-related topic areas.
• Integrating planning for sustainability, spread and scale into digital health evaluations.
• Supporting implementation science team grants to incorporate planning for sustainability, spread and scale into research projects.
• Leading a systematic review on sustainability, spread, and scale of Audit & Feedback interventions.
Public Discussion Groups
Once per month we host an online discussion group that provides an opportunity for people to discuss a key topic or paper with peers and experts in the field. No experience or expertise in implementation science is necessary as we will always have a place for people who are new to the field.
To register to receive information about upcoming events, please click here.
Our Team
The OSS team includes a core group of individuals from the Women’s College Research Institute, Women’s College Institute for Health Systems Solutions and Virtual Care (WIHV), and several other organizations and universities.
Expertise includes implementation science, digital health evaluation, health services research, health equity, dissemination, communications, and public policy. Additional expertise will be drawn from within and beyond WIHV as needed.
Core Team members include:
Celia Laur
Celia Laur
Scientific Lead
Celia Laur is a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr Noah Ivers. She is involved in a series of qualitative projects exploring physicians’ antibiotic and opioid prescribing practices in Ontario in an effort to inform upcoming interventions and behaviour change in practice. Celia has a keen interest in implementation science/practice, quality improvement, and how to sustain and spread successful changes within various healthcare settings and across topic areas.
Celia completed her PhD at the University of Waterloo in the School of Public Health and Health Systems under the supervision of Professor Heather Keller. Her work focused on understanding healthcare professionals’ perspectives on implementing, spreading and sustaining nutrition care activities in hospitals across Canada. To apply the lessons learned to another context, she has also explored how Family Health Teams started to set up nutrition screening. Celia is a Registered Public Health Nutritionist in the UK, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Life Member of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. She completed her BSc Honours in Health Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, a Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Education at the University of Dundee, Scotland, and a Masters in Public Health Nutrition at the University of Southampton, UK.
Aisha Lofters
Aisha is a scientist at the Women's College Research Institute (WCRI), adjunct scientist at IC/ES, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. She currently holds a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and holds the Chair in Implementation Science at the Peter Gilgan Centre for Women’s Cancers at Women’s College Hospital in partnership with the Canadian Cancer Society.
Aisha is also the Provincial Primary Care Lead, Cancer Screening at Cancer Care Ontario (Ontario Health). Her research program focusses on improving quality of care in cancer screening and prevention, particularly for populations that experience marginalization.
Rumaisa Khan
Rumaisa Khan
Innovation Spread & Scale Lead
Rumaisa Khan is the Innovation Spread and Scale Lead at the Peter Gilgan Centre for Women's Cancers at WCH, where she works to develop, evaluate, and spread and scale innovative models of care that push the envelope on women’s cancers. Rumaisa has a strong interest in health equity, implementation science and patient engagement, and is particularly interested in pushing programs and methods to engage under-screened racialized women in prevention and health communication efforts. Rumaisa holds a Master of Public Health in Health Promotion from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto. Rumaisa holds professional experiences at the national and international level, through leading policy reports for youth support with the Wellesley Institute, as a Queen Elizabeth Scholar with the University of Nariobi, and supporting virtual care evaluations with the Centre for Digital Health Evaluation at WCH.
Noah Ivers
Dr. Noah Ivers
Innovation Fellow & Scientist
Noah is a scientist at Women's College Research Institute (WCRI) and adjunct scientist at IC/ES. He is also a family physician at Women's College Hospital (WCH) and an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. Recently receiving the New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Noah is leading change that will make a difference for patients and families across Ontario.
Dr. Onil Bhattacharyya
Dr. Onil Bhattacharyya
Innovation Fellow & Scientist
Onil
is a senior scientist at Women's College Research Institute (WCRI) and
the Frigon Blau Chair in Family Medicine Research at Women’s College
Hospital and recipient of the Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellowship in
Health Care Policy and Practice. He practices family medicine and is an
associate professor at the University of Toronto in Family and Community
Medicine and the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation
(IHPME). His research focuses on the integration of care for people with
complex needs, examining how health systems can build capacity for
innovation in service delivery.
He co-led Building Bridges to Integrate Care, a citywide incubator for new models of care, and is now co-lead of Better Access to Care for Complex Needs (BeACCON), a provincial network within the national Canadian Institute for Health Research Strategy for Patient Oriented Research. Onil is also interested in helping health care organizations become more adept at improving existing services and exploring new ways of providing care. He does this by adapting innovation methods from the design and software industries, like user-centered design and Lean Startup to generate new models of care, studying their relationship with methods to improve quality and rigorously measure the impact of services.
Implementation Support Team members include:
• Dr. Celia Laur – Scientific Lead
• Katherine Ford, RD, PhD, CIHR Health System Impact Fellow with the University of Waterloo & the Canadian Nutrition Society
• Alyssa Kelly, PhD(c), University of Toronto (on leave)
• Zeenat Ladak – CIHR Health System Impact Fellow with the Office of Spread & Scale and University of Toronto
• Priscilla Medeiros, PhD, Knowledge Mobilization Specialist at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children
• Sam Petrie, PhD, CIHR Health System Impact Fellow with the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research & the University of Toronto
• Josh Porat-Dahlerbruch, PhD, Ben Gurion University; the Israel Implementation Science and Policy Engagement Centre (IS-PEC)
• Nida Shah, Manager, Virtual Care, WIHV
• Jennifer Shuldiner, PhD, Research Lead, WIHV
• Camille Williams, PhD, WIHV
Our Funders
The OSS is supported by the Ontario SPOR (Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research) Support Unit (OSSU). The OSSU is a network that engages researchers, patients, and other partners in patient-oriented research to improve the health of Ontarians and the health care system.
Additional funding is provided through research grants and consulting contracts.
Contact us at oss@wchospital.ca to learn more about how we can help you achieve impact.
Implementation Science: The study of methods to promote the adoption and integration of evidence-based practices, interventions, and policies into routine health care and public health settings to improve the impact on population health (National Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Control & Population Science)
Sustainability: The extent to which a newly implemented treatment is maintained or institutionalized within a service setting’s ongoing, stable operations. (Proctor et al, 2011)
Spread: Replicating an initiative somewhere else (i.e. one site to another) (Greenhalgh & Papoutsi, 2019)
Scale: Deliberate efforts to increase the impact of innovations successfully tested in pilot or experimental projects so as to benefit more people and to foster policy and program development on a lasting basis. (ExpandNet; Simmons et al, 2007)
