D r. Merrilee Fullerton is a family physician practicing in the Ottawa area for the past 20 years. She attended the University of Ottawa from 1980-1982 at an undergraduate level and then attended medical school from 1982-86 spending two subsequent years in Edmonton, Alberta completing a Family Medicine residency. Currently, she is Vice President of the Academy of Medicine Ottawa. Born in Whitehorse, Yukon in 1961 she has experienced first-hand the social and health issues affecting many of Canada’s aboriginal people. She has lived most of her life in Ottawa, Ontario and comes from a family of physicians including two siblings. Her medical background includes work in inner city environments as well as rural, urban and suburban settings including providing emergency medical services in hospital and urgent care settings, palliative care and long term care as well as comprehensive family medicine.
She is an individual with a passion for health care issues that affect many patients and is a freelance writer having numerous articles published in The Ottawa Citizen from 2004 to 2006 and has managed her own blog since 2006, “Dr. Merrilee Fullerton on Healthcare”.
More recently, she has assisted the Ontario Medical Association in developing policy for interprofessional/multidisciplinary care. She is presently an executive board member of the Ontario Medical Association’s Section on General and Family Practice and a member of the Champlain Local Health Integration Network’s Health Professionals Advisory Committee.
As a mother of three children and a daughter of aging parents she understands the present needs in health care as well as future needs. Married for 22 years to Steve Kaminski, an Ottawa area entrepreneur, real estate developer and active member of the Ottawa Hospital Foundation, her immediate family has been active in fundraising for the Ottawa Hospital for the past 15 years.
She believes that achieving a balance in health care provision that supports patients while at the same time empowering them in their own care is needed as health care moves forward into the new millennium.
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