Katherine Rouleau CCFP (F)CFP MHsc.

Family Physician- Unity Health-St-Michael's Hospital, Toronto
Associate Professor
Vice Chair, Global Health & Social Accountability
Director, WHO Collaborating Centre on Family Medicine and Primary Care
Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto

Robert Sheppard Award in Postgraduate Medical Education

Postgraduate Medical Education Awards

Katherine Rouleau

Biography

Dr. Katherine Rouleau is a family physician at Unity Health-St-Michael’s Hospital. At the University of Toronto, she is associate professor, Vice-Chair of the Global Health and Social Accountability and director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Family Medicine and Primary Care in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. Her clinical and academic interests include health equity, the role of family medicine and primary care in strengthening health systems locally and globally, global health education, the scholarship-leadership continuum and the care of disadvantaged populations in Canada and abroad.

I am deeply grateful to be part of a rich fabric of teachers, learners and patients striving to address the needs of people who are socially disadvantaged. We come together as in a kaleidoscope, our roles overlapping, shifting, and flowing from one to another: patients are also teachers, teachers are also learners and students are often both. The light that streams through our kaleidoscope is part pain, part anger, part determination, part hope. It seems to me that one of the invitations extended to us as an academic community committed to health equity and social justice, is to find the drive and humility to teach one another, to transform ourselves and the structures that drive inequity, and to fully engage those who have experienced the pain and indignity of poverty and oppression.

About the Award

The Robert Sheppard Award for Health Equity and Social Justice was established in 2016 in honour of Dr. Robert Sheppard who served as Associate Dean, Postgraduate Medicine. Dr. Sheppard was deeply committed to volunteering initiatives in his community after retiring from medicine. This award recognizes the outstanding contributions of faculty members and postgraduate trainees in the development and/or implementation of activities, programs or research related to social justice and health equity in faculty development or postgraduate medical education.