Dr. Wendy V. Norman is a Professor in the Department of Family Practice at the UBC Faculty of Medicine, where she is also an associate member in both the School of Population and Public Health and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. In 2024, she was appointed Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Family Planning Innovation, the first of its kind in the country. Read this editorial to learn more about her journey from rural family physician to internationally celebrated researcher, and the Clinician Scholar Program offered by the Department of Family Practice that helped her along the way.
As a renowned expert in sexual health and family planning, Dr. Wendy Norman’s research has led to pivotal changes in provincial and federal contraception and abortion policies in Canada and around the globe. Before gaining prestige as a researcher, Dr. Norman first practiced as a rural family physician. “Growing up, my mother was a nurse. It was instilled in me at a young age that it is important to contribute to the collective health of our communities,” she shares. As a teenager, Norman hitchhiked across Southeast Asia, where she witnessed firsthand the challenges one can face without access to critical health care and support. “I became highly motivated to undertake training to contribute in this way,” she says.
After finishing her medical training, Dr. Norman practiced for fifteen years as a full-service general practitioner in Sechelt, British Columbia. She also worked in Family Planning Services at the British Columbia Women’s Hospital after moving to Vancouver. In both these roles, Norman saw clearly the points of disconnect between the on-the-ground work of primary care providers and the health systems and policies that are meant to support them. “It became apparent to me that the health policies, systems, and services that are upstream to the family physician’s office play a critical role in whether my patients can achieve their own health goals,” she says.
Driven by research questions forged through years of experience serving rural and urban communities, Dr. Norman enrolled in the Enhanced Skills – Clinician Scholar Program offered by the UBC Department of Family Practice. As she gradually made the transition from clinician to researcher, the importance of including care providers and policy makers in every stage of the research process remained paramount.
Enhanced Skills – Clinician Scholar Program
UBC’s Clinician Scholar Program is one of seven across Canada, and offers part-time positions for family physicians in family practice scholarship. Click the button below to learn more.
Dr. Norman is an adamant proponent of iKT. Otherwise known as Integrated Knowledge Translation, iKT is a research principle that involves knowledge users – such as family doctors, midwives, physiotherapists, counselors, and care providers from a wide range of other disciplines – as equal partners alongside researchers and policymakers, throughout the entire research process. “By connecting and convening the people who will use the new findings of the research before we even start, we can ensure the research questions we ask address a priority need,” she adds. “By engaging care providers who are on the frontlines of health care, we can better find out what they need to achieve goals in population health. The entire research process is better positioned to make a difference.”
The Contraception and Abortion Research Team – Group de recherche sur l’avortement et la contraception (CART-GRAC), of which Dr. Norman is director and a co-founder, is an example of how engaging knowledge users early on can lead to more efficient mobilization of research findings. “We started with a group in British Columbia in 2009, then opened up our research nationally in 2011,” she says. “We engaged health policymakers from provincial and federal systems, leads for health care services in the areas of advocacy and sexual health, and health care providers in regular meetings.”
Together, the group asked questions from literature, formed discussions, brought forth scientific presentations about current knowledge, then set working groups, and convened collaborators to gauge priority. Their collective input was used to develop a research proposal, which received funding through the Canadian Institute of Health Research. “Because policymakers were collaborators in every step of our process and could see the difference the research was making, the B.C. government was able to implement the research findings before it was published,” says Dr. Norman.
Dr. Norman credits the 2-year Enhanced Skills Program with anchoring the pivots along her career. “Evidence developed at UBC and in the Department of Family Practice on making contraception free was very well received by policymakers, and eventually became law in Canada,” she says. “ It was an absolute delight to work with dozens of family physicians from the department, who were interested in exploring how to ask and answer important questions. It helped me transition from full-time clinical practice to half-time research, then eventually full-time research.”
In 2013, two years after she completed the program as a learner, Dr. Norman was invited to join Enhanced Skills as its director. She helmed the program until 2023. “Being asked to lead the program a couple of years after participating in it as a learner was a huge honour,” she shares. “It was a tremendous privilege to work with physicians who applied to the program, and who had fabulous ideas. As family physicians, they were passionate about the health outcomes of not only their own patients, but others in Canada and around the world. They could see there was some unknown necessity, and threw in everything they had to learn what could make health better.”
Are you a family physician interested in diving into research to contribute to the knowledge base of family practice and primary health care? Learn more about the Clinician Scholar Program offered by the UBC Department of Family Practice.