Dr. Rachelle Ashcroft

Dr. Rachelle Ashcroft

Project Lead: The Patient Experience and Virtual Primary Care Appointments

Rachelle Ashcroft is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto. She is also Cross-Appointed to the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the University of Toronto in 2016,  Dr. Ashcroft held the position of Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. She also completed the Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) post-doctoral training program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the Transdisciplinary Understanding and Training on Research – Primary Health Care (TUTOR-PHC) training program. Dr. Ashcroft has >14 years of clinical social work practice in various health care environments including primary care, sexual health, and community mental health organizations. She also practiced as a social worker in Winnipeg’s Health Science Centre in the trauma, psychiatry, bone marrow transplant, nephrology, and neurosurgery programs. She holds a PhD in Social Work from Wilfrid Laurier University, and an MSW and a BSW from the University of Manitoba.

Dr. Ashcroft’s current research focuses on organizational and policy-contexts that support the delivery of team-based primary care, patient-centred virtual care, and collaborative mental health care. Dr. Ashcroft is a mentor in the TUTOR-PHC program, a pan-Canadian interdisciplinary primary care research capacity-building program. In addition, Dr. Ashcroft is currently the Vice-President of the Ontario Association of Social Workers https://www.oasw.org/Public/About_OASW/Dr_Rachelle_Ashcroft.aspx