Primary Health Care: Open Access

Biography

Wendy Peterson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing, University of Ottawa and an associate member of the Nursing Best Practice Research Unit.  Wendy’s program of research aims to improve the quality and experience of maternal-newborn health services for marginalized women by addressing disparities in access to health services, facilitating woman-centered humanistic birth, and exploring the role of registered nurses in interprofessional primary maternity care teams.

Wendy has held principal and co-investigator roles in studies funded by local, provincial and federal agencies.  Examples of these research projects include those designed to:

• understand the health service experiences of adolescent mothers in hospital and urban community settings;
• describe adolescent mother-friendly inpatient perinatal nursing care;
• inform and evaluate interventions to integrate public health and community health centre services for the purpose of improving access to care for marginalized childbearing families;
• evaluate a national primary care initiative to facilitate interprofessional maternity care;
• describe the impact of fetal fibronectin testing on the experiences of women with symptoms of preterm labour.

Wendy’s clinical experience includes working in high risk obstetrics and neonatal intensive care. After graduating with her PhD (Nursing) from McMaster University, Wendy completed a postdoctoral fellowship in primary health care services funded by CHSRF (Dr. Edwards’ Chair in Multiple Interventions for Community Health) and TUTOR-PHC (CIHR) and co-supervised by Nancy Edwards, PhD, and Barbara Davies, PhD, at the University of Ottawa. Wendy currently teaches Care of the Childbearing Family, Research Methods and Nursing Professionalism and Ethics in the undergraduate program and supervises five brilliant graduate students.

Research Interest

 Community health planning, Community Health Nursing, Health Services,  Maternity Care, Adolescent and Adult Mothers’ Satisfaction.

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