News

By Kim Barnhardt

It takes a visionary to create change. That’s an apt label for the architect of patient-oriented research in Ontario, Dr. Vasanthi Srinivasan, whose vision has helped change the research landscape – and culture – across the province. As OSSU’s inaugural Executive Director, she painted a vision of patient-oriented research in which patients are equal partners in health research, helped assemble a network of research centres across Ontario with specific research expertise, and built partnerships with SPOR and the then Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care which together provided funding for this nascent movement.

Fast forward more than a decade later to OSSU’s Research Day in 2025, celebrating the remarkable achievements of the collective across diverse health areas, including primary care and mental health resources, healthy ageing, heart failure interventions, and ensuring sex, gender and diversity perspectives are integrated into research and care. 

“The scale and spread in the province that the centres and us have worked to accomplish is impressive,” says Dr. Srinivasan. “We are a large province, much larger than others, with many millions of people so we were testing a model, and not sure if it was the ideal model, but I was convinced there were centres of excellence so we pulled together experts with methods focus, others with a policy focus to translating evidence into policy, and others had data expertise. I believe the construct works really well and I can say that after 10 years of this “experiment”, we are assured now after all these years of sustaining patient partnership in research in Ontario.”

“Despite a complex environment, Dr. Srinivasan has convened leading experts across Ontario to ensure health research addresses priority system challenges,” says Dr. Paul Hebert, President, CIHR. “As the founding Executive Director of the Ontario SPOR SUPPORT Unit, her work has enabled evidence-informed policy and clinical practice across the gamut of health issues: from supporting language-concordant care for Franco-Ontarians, to improving equitable cancer screening in rural and northern regions, to supporting data-driven approaches to caring for the most vulnerable children in Ontario hospitals. Patients, caregivers and their families in this province benefit from her leadership every day.”

Key to success is OSSU’s collaborative, decentralized “hub and spoke” model – with OSSU at the centre as a coordinating body – that plays to the strengths of the partners. The model, a network of people and organizations, now includes 14 Research Centres, 8 Research Initiatives, dozens of projects funded by research grants and hundreds of trainees, researchers and patient partners.

“My responsibility is to manage the collective and to make the others shine,” says Dr. Srinivasan. “The organization is there to support research in every way possible and we are the main connection to the funders so we make sure all of that is happening. We want to shine the light on the partnership as it’s unusual. We started the model with a hope which we have realized.”

A critical element in OSSU’s approach is communication, engagement and knowledge-sharing with researchers, trainees, patient partners and government. For example, OSSU policy roundtables showcase research, followed by in-camera meetings with policy-makers for a deep dive into the work to help with uptake.

Recognition of regional differences and diverse needs across Ontario is woven through OSSU’s work.

“It’s also good to show gender-based analysis, equity considerations of how this will or potentially will affect populations, and the vastness of our province means people have different specialties in different regions,” she says. “The north is very different from the south so we ensured we had a centre in the north to look after rural issues [Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research]. We had to tackle Indigenous issues and Francophone populations in the north and east that had different needs. The model we created facilitated that.”

The impacts of work across the OSSU network, with patient-partnership embedded in research as part of a culture change, feeds the province’s Learning Health System to help improve health care delivery, patient experience, health equity and more.

What do the next 10 years hold?

“Now in year 11 we have the scale and spread all over Ontario. Researchers come to us and say, “I’m doing this, can you connect us to Quebec or other jurisdictions so we can get patient partners from other places?” I feel that this will be sustained as a way forward as people have understood the value of patient partnership in research.”

As the Greek philosopher Aristotle said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, a fitting analysis of Ontario’s multifaceted research system that is built on a solid foundation of partnerships, connections and perseverance.