Please note: Dr. Sunderji is not taking any summer students in 2019.
Dr. Sunderji is a psychiatrist and a researcher in quality improvement and education in the area of integrated / collaborative mental health care. She is the physician lead for quality improvement in the St. Michael’s Hospital Mental Health and Addictions Service and an Assistant Professor and Lead for integrated mental health care education in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She has a Master’s in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, is a member of the Delta Omega Alpha Honour Society, and was recently awarded the Association for Academic Psychiatry’s Early Career Development Award.
Dr. Sunderji’s research aims to improve the implementation of collaborative mental health care models in primary care settings. Collaborative care models have been widely adopted, yet implementation is highly variable, frequently does not conform to evidence based practice, and has rarely been evaluated. Furthermore, evaluation frameworks and metrics are lacking. In her funded research, Dr. Sunderji is developing a quality framework and quality measures by which to evaluate and improve collaborative care in primary care. This novel framework sets standards for clinical programs, and promotes data-driven quality improvement (QI) efforts. The framework has attracted interest in Canada and the United States.
Dr. Sunderji also uses her education leadership activities to promote knowledge translation of evidence-based models of collaborative care by supporting practicing healthcare providers and trainees to implement and improve guideline-based, measurement-based, population-based care in their clinical practice settings. Thus, the aforementioned quality framework and measures also identify higher order outcomes at the patient, population, and health system levels, that can be incorporated into educational program evaluation.
