Elizabeth Lin

Dr. Lin is an Associate Professor with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a Scientist in the Department of Education at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and Adjunct Senior Faculty at IC/ES (formerly, the Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences).

Her work focuses on two areas. For the past 30 years, she has done research in mental health and addictions services using administrative databases or large-scale population surveys. She has explored hospital, emergency department, and physician-provided services as well as care provided by community agencies for both the general public as well as for specific groups such as individuals with depression and, more recently, adult Ontarians with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). In addition, her latest project has involved assessing the forensic/criminal justice involvement of adults with IDD in forensic inpatient, provincial and federal prisons, and community mental health agencies. The unifying thread in her work is a particular interest in performance and evaluation indicators, what kind of information they do (and do not) provide, and what kinds of conclusions and actions they can inspire.

More recently, she has moved to the Education Department at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and has consequently added education evaluation to her portfolio. Her ongoing projects include the development of a co-created scoping review on how Recovery Colleges are evaluated, the development of a formative evaluation strategy for a Framework teaching structural competencies to physician leaders, and conducting a pragmatic RCT comparing training methods for teaching self-protection and team-control physical skills to clinical staff.