Kristy Yiu

At the time of the QE Scholarship, Kristy was a recent graduate of the Bachelor of Health Sciences program who was completing additional undergraduate coursework. Her interest in social determinants of health, with a specific focus on barriers to access to health services, stemmed from her previous trip to La Romana, Dominican Republic where she collected data for her thesis work. She also hopes to apply her experience of working with the Program of Evidence-based Care (Cancer Care Ontario) into a health policy context through assisting in gathering best available evidence for stakeholder dialogues. 

As an outbound Queen Elizabeth Scholar, Kristy travelled to Cape Town, South Africa to complete a three-month internship with the Centre of Evidence-based Health Care at Stellenbosch University. With an increasing focus being placed on non-communicable diseases within the South African health care system, her research revolved around integration of care for hypertension and diabetes. She was excited to see how her work might inform policy makers of the best available research evidence on integration of care initiatives and assist in initiating future research to bridge the knowledge gap in current literature.