Sabrina T. Wong, RN, PhD, FAAN, FCAHS
NINR Scientific Director
Dr. Wong was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2020 and elected as a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2022. Dr. Wong’s contributions as a scholar and leader in primary care research are widely recognized, nationally and internationally. She earned her bachelor’s in nursing, from the University of British Columbia; her masters degree in health administration and community health and doctorate from the University of California, San Francisco. Her dissertation examined access to care for Latinx and African American children through a nurse practitioner-led clinic. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco Institute for Health Services and Policy Studies. In past roles, she has served as the co-chair for the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network, playing a central role in the development of a primary care federated clinical electronic medical record repository that can be used for research, disease surveillance and quality improvement. She has a long-standing commitment to health and healthcare inequities, particularly in the area of primary health care.
Dr. Wong’s own research currently focuses in the area of primary care. She examines interventions at the practice and geographic level that could improve health and healthcare outcomes, particularly for those who are made vulnerable due to multiple intersecting social determinants of health. Another part of her work is development of electronic medical record data linked to patient reported experience and outcome measures as a potential source of information to inform practice and communicable and non-communicable disease surveillance. Her research portfolio has included Canadian Institutes for Health Research supported work into patient experiences in primary care, particularly those who speak English as a second language, team based primary care and early identification of issues (e.g. frailty, potentially avoidable antibiotic prescribing for respiratory tract infections) where primary care can intervene. Dr. Wong and her colleagues have increased national and international attention to patient reported experiences and outcomes and the use of primary care electronic medical record data. Dr. Wong has also been part of teams developing primary care equity-oriented interventions.