Annual Report 2022-2023: Continuing Professional and Practice Development

Submitted by Dr. Rajeevan Rasasingham, Director, Faculty Development

I would like to begin by thanking the CPPD Committee who have been amazingly supportive to all our initiatives this year.  Particular thank you to Dr Certina Ho, who has been an incredibly supportive of our scholarship initiatives.

I would also like to thank Dr Laura Rivera and Pharm Students, Eulaine Ma and Wei Wei, who are part of our scholarship team that has presented at numerous conferences on practice change in CPPD.

I would also like to thank Dr Karen Wang and Dr Marlene Taube-Schiff for their leadership in helping with the CPPD National Conference.

This year we had three significant accomplishments.  We have focussed heavily on increasing our capacity building initiatives in CPPD and QI.  Therefore, we collaborated with our national partners in forming the CPPD National Conference to increase the capacity of learners and early career researchers in this area.  The programming committee felt this was a needed nationally and we felt as larger university we could definitely help from a national perspective. As such, we will be having the first national collaborative conference in this area.  There will be leaders in CPPD talking about the state of CPPD/QI and we will also have an abstract corner to publicize the work of researchers in this area.   We will also have a workshop on Quality Improvement to help clinicians learn the principles of quality improvement.  Moreover, we will also have workshops on developing a career in this area.  We hope this venture will help build capacity in this area for our profession.

Over the last couple of years, we have also working on increasing the research potential our faculty.  We have been humbled and grateful to have been awarded the most number of CPPD grants/awards by any department at the University of Toronto over the last 3 years.  Two Department members were also given the prestigious Colin Woolf Award by the University of Toronto at this year’s award ceremony.   

Our portfolio has also collaborated at numerous national conference with other universities in Canada. The past year we presented with McMaster University and COPCE on a workshop/presentation on CPPD accreditation principles.  This workshop was also presented at the Council for Psychiatric Education’s Annual meeting. This presentation was well received by fellow CPD Educators/Researchers.

Once again, this year, we have been incredibly successful on the conference front.  We have had exceptional attendance at our psychopharm and psychotherapy conference. I wanted to express my sincere gratitude to our faculty for their support in making our events successful.  We also expanded the City Wide Psychiatry grands rounds. The feedback and attendance has been exceptional. We have had attendees from around the world at these events.  

Lastly, I would like to thank Dr Benoit Mulsant, the senior executive team, SAC, Dr Vigod and Dr Sockalingam for their kind support of this portfolio.  The admin team of Ms Raisiawan and Mr Gane has been exceptional in their support of our events.  Sincere gratitude to them for their support of this portfolio.