Edward Etchells
Edward Etchelles serves as a project mentor supporting Faculty members throughout the University who are involved in Quality Improvement work. He joined the faculty of the Department of Medicine after completing an MSc in Clinical Epidemiology. Dr. Etchell’s initial academic interest lay in clinical bioethics, with a focus on informed consent and decision making capacity. But, he realized – after five years of inpatient attending – that safe and reliable delivery of healthcare were recurrent problems. Edward conducted some of the original research that established medication reconciliation globally as a best practice in patient safety and he was a co-investigator on the Canadian Adverse Events Study. Edward co-founded the Patient Safety Service, the first hospital-based academic safety service in Canada, with support from the SHSC senior leadership team. Dr. Etchells helped to establish the Department of Medicine’s Quality Partners program in 2006 and the U of T Certificate Program in Quality and Patient Safety in 2008. He is currently Medical Director of Information Services at SHSC. His research interests include medication reconciliation, computerized medication order entry, and real time alerting and decision support for critical laboratory values.