Rita McCracken
SCIENTIST, MD, CCFP, PHD
Dr. Rita McCracken’s current practice is a combination of research, clinical work, teaching, and administration.
Research Interests
- Audit and feedback to improve primary care prescribing
- Health human resources
- Polypharmacy and deprescribing
- Frailty, ageing
- Patient-oriented research outcomes
- Primary care research
- Health services evaluation
Her research interests include minimizing harm from prescription medication, especially for older people and using research methods to measure and plan for health human resources planning in primary care.
She is a full-service, community-based family physician in East Vancouver, and also provides nursing home care at St. Vincent’s Langara. Dr. McCracken supervises and mentors family medicine residents in the St. Paul’s Family Practice residency site for their research projects. She is Principal Investigator for The Models and Access Atlas of Primary Care: British Columbia.
She chose medicine as a second career after ten years working in Human Resources for high tech companies and has an undergraduate degree in Commerce from the University of Alberta. Dr. McCracken completed medical school at the University of Calgary and her Family Practice residency at St. Paul’s Hospital.
Additional Affiliations
-
Family Physician CCFP (COE), Vancouver
Assistant -
Professor, Faculty of Medicine, UBC
Researcher, Department of Family Practice, UBC - Researcher, Therapeutics Initiative, UBC
- Research Director, Department of Family Practice, PHC
- Site Faculty Lead, Resident Research, St. Paul’s Hospital Family Practice Residency, UBC
Media Coverage
- Increase in antipsychotic use in B.C. long-term care homes worries seniors advocate (Yahoo! News, April 2021)
- Many in BC Don’t Have Family Doctors. That’s Not Too Big a Deal Right Now (The Tyee, March 2020)
- Federal parties promise more family doctors — but that won’t necessarily improve access (Global News, September 2019)
- Canada facing doctor shortage (CBC News, May 2019
- Want more family doctors? Change how they work and get paid, says B.C. researcher (CBC News, March 2019)
- Health benefits of cycling could save taxpayers millions of dollars (The Georgia Straight, March 2018)
