Celebrating education scholarship:
A look at the inaugural winners of the Cynthia Whitehead Award
As a family physician and educator who says she is “not really a researcher,” Dr. Margarita Lam-Antoniades didn’t expect to be the inaugural recipient of the Cynthia Whitehead Award for Best Education Scholarship Publication last year.
“It was a surprise to me, and it was a great honour,” says the quality improvement education lead at the Department of Family and Community Medicine (DFCM), who was nominated for the award by a colleague.
The Cynthia Whitehead Award was launched in 2025 to recognize DFCM faculty who have made an impactful contribution to family medicine education or health professions education scholarship through dissemination in a peer-reviewed publication.
Improving patient safety through learner-centred tools
Awards were not on Dr. Lam-Antoniades’ radar when she began her work for the winning project “Simple tool for teaching patient safety through incident analysis,” which was published in Canadian Family Physician.
As the patient safety lead at the St. Michael’s Hospital Academic Family Health Team (FHT), Dr. Lam-Antoniades noticed there wasn’t a systematic way of teaching patient safety in the curriculum. Further, when learners experienced a patient safety incident, they would often look at it as shameful and personal rather than as an opportunity for learning and improvement.
“When something goes wrong, especially doctors, we blame ourselves,” she says. But, working in such a complex health-care system, a systematic look at most of these situations reveals multiple contributing factors. “And maybe if we shift some of those system things, we can prevent these incidents from happening again.”
To help examine these systems and reduce stigma around these safety events, Dr. Lam-Antoniades created a tool to guide learners through incident discussions. The tool, which is now embedded in the St. Michael’s family medicine residency curriculum, supports more open, reflective learning. Last year it was introduced across all DFCM sites with the goal of helping future family physicians feel comfortable talking about difficult experiences and ultimately fostering a culture of patient safety across the department.
While Dr. Lam-Antoniades’ winning project focused on improving the health system through learners, the other inaugural Cynthia Whitehead Award-winning paper focused on improving the health system through continuing professional development (CPD).
Expanding the understanding of CPD
“From Two Dimensions to Multidimensions: A Mechanistic Model to Support Deliberate CPD Development, Coordination, and Evaluation,” led by Dr. Abhimanyu Sud and published in The Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions, was initiated after Dr. Sud noticed that there was a gap in understanding about what CPD is and how it can work.
“If you read enough journal articles, you'll see this throwaway line of, ‘If we just educate more doctors on this issue, then we'll see some improvement,’” says the DFCM assistant professor. “Those kinds of comments often convey very little understanding of what actually constitutes CPD.”
In his project, Dr. Sud created a five-mechanism model to clarify the complexity of CPD. Rather than simply asking if CPD works, the research examined how and why it works. In using this model to do a deeper dive into the effectiveness of CPD, Dr. Sud says it allows practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to better take advantage of CPD, thus enhancing its educational impact.
“Being leaders in how we educate the current and next generations is a really important part of what our department does,” he says.
Honouring educators who strengthen the system
For Dr. Whitehead—the award’s namesake and DFCM’s inaugural vice-chair of education and director of the Office of Education Scholarship—advancing education through research has been a career-long commitment.
“If we just do education based on assumption or tradition, it can be a big problem. If education is not scientifically grounded, it's much less likely to be successful,” she says.
As DFCM supports today’s family physicians and trains those who will lead tomorrow’s care, she emphasizes, “We don’t have time to mess around. Too many Canadians do not have access to primary care right now.
“If we don't get primary care right, the rest of the system doesn't work. Primary care education scholarship is fundamental.”
This is why Dr. Whitehead is so happy that the education scholarship award was created.
“There's so much good work happening in DFCM,” she says. “To recognize those educators and the education researchers who are doing that work is really important. It's not just for them—it's also for the field, for patients, and for Canada.”
Applications for this year’s Cynthia Whitehead Award for Best Education Scholarship Publication are now open. For more information and to apply, visit https://dfcm.utoronto.ca/program-awards.