Rachelle Ashcroft

Dr. Rachelle Ashcroft is an Associate Professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, at the University of Toronto; and, is cross-appointed to the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Ashcroft joined the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work in 2016 as an Assistant Professor from the School of Social Work at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. She completed the Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) post-doctoral training program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Dr. Ashcroft has >14 years of social work practice in various health care environments including community HIV and community mental health organizations. She then practiced as a social worker in Winnipeg’s Health Science Centre in trauma, psychiatry, bone marrow transplant, nephrology, and neurosurgery.

As a health system researcher, Dr. Ashcroft has particular interest in nurturing organizational and policy-contexts that support the delivery of team-based primary care, patient-centred virtual care, interprofessional collaboration, and strengthening social work practice in primary care and other healthcare settings. Dr. Ashcroft is a core-funded investigator of INSPIRE-PHC. Since 2003, she has been an active mentor in the TUTOR-PHC program, a pan-Canadian interdisciplinary research capacity-building program that has been training PHC researchers. The program is led by 30 co-investigators, representing 14 universities and five provinces across Canada. Since 2019, she has held the position as Vice-President at the Ontario Association of Social Workers.