2025 Rising Star Early Career Award in Health Services and Policy Research

Recognizing emerging Health Services and Policy Researchers

The CIHR Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (CIHR-IHSPR) is pleased to announce that Dr. Femke Hoekstra is the recipient of the 2025 Rising Star Early Career Award in Health Services and Policy Research her project titled “Transforming access to medications in rural, remote, and Indigenous communities: Implementing and evaluating virtual pharmacist care and drone delivery services”.

This award recognizes the excellence of emerging health services and policy researchers at the early career stage and is awarded to the highest ranking Early-Career Investigator in CIHR’s Project Grant competition working within the mandate of IHSPR. The prize entails a $25,000 supplemental grant to support research and/or knowledge mobilization for the duration of 1 year.

In recognizing and supporting research excellence, IHSPR Career Awards are a key strategy to help IHSPR’s 2021-26 Strategic Plan: Accelerate Health Care System Transformation through Research to Achieve the Quadruple Aim and Health Equity for All and CIHR’s 2021-31 Strategic Plan: A Vision for a Healthier Future.

About the Recipient

Dr. Femke Hoekstra

Dr. Femke Hoekstra, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Social Medicine at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in the area of Implementation Science. She is also an Investigator with the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management (CCDPM) at UBC Okanagan and an Investigator of the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD). Dr. Hoekstra earned her PhD from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, with expertise in implementation science, rehabilitation, and physical activity promotion.

Dr. Hoekstra leads the Implementation Science & Isolated Communities Lab, where her research program focuses on improving (virtual) health services and care for equity deserving populations in rural, remote, and isolated communities. Her work examines how health innovations are implemented in real world settings, drawing on the perspectives of patients, communities, clinicians, and policymakers. Central to her approach is meaningful engagement of knowledge users as partners throughout the research process to ensure relevance, quality, and impact.

Her CIHR funded research aims to understand and evaluate the impact of implementing virtual pharmacist care paired with drone delivery of medications in rural, remote, and Indigenous communities. This innovative service model will allow patients to connect with pharmacists via phone or video from their homes while medications are delivered directly to their community by drone. Working in partnership with Indigenous leaders, community members, health professionals, industry collaborators, and decision-makers, Dr. Hoekstra’s team will study whether this approach reduces travel costs, improves medication access and use, and supports culturally safe care. The project also explores how this service can be sustained locally and scaled to other communities across Canada and internationally. By reducing barriers to care, lowering costs, and advancing health equity, Dr. Hoekstra’s research has the potential to transform access to essential medications in underserved communities.

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