Deborah Cook awarded Royal Society of Canada’s McLaughlin Medal

Deborah Cook, professor in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University, has been awarded the McLaughlin Medal by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC).

The McLaughlin Medal is awarded for important research of sustained excellence in any branch of medical sciences. The medal was established in 1978 by the RSC through the generosity of the R. Samuel McLaughlin Foundation.

“It has been a great privilege to conduct research that informs and improves the care of critically ill adults,” says Cook, a Distinguished University Professor at McMaster and a three-term Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Translation in Critical Care. “Together with bedside colleagues here in Hamilton, collaborators across the country and around the world, our Canadian-led investigations have had global impact.”

Cook is the foremost authority in clinical research methods and patient-centered critical care medicine. Throughout an illustrious career spanning over three decades, her research has made high-impact, practice-changing scientific contributions that improve the care of critically ill patients worldwide. Her prolific research output includes peer-reviewed research grants totalling $155 million and 900 peer-reviewed publications, with more than 20 articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and more than 50 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

As Canada’s first intensivist trained in clinical epidemiology and biostatistics, her work defined evidence-based critical care medicine when it was a budding specialty. At the vanguard of patient-centered research in critically ill patients, her seminal studies have addressed the incidence, risk factors, cost, and prevention of gastrointestinal bleeding; the prevention, diagnosis, and management of ventilator-associated pneumonia; and the screening, diagnosis, and prevention of venous thromboembolism in critically ill patients.

By preventing common and often lethal complications, Cook’s sustained research excellence in the medical sciences has mitigated the enormous human and economic costs of critical illness for patients, families, healthcare systems, and society.

In 2013, Cook created the 3 Wishes Project – an innovative, low-technology, low-risk, low-cost intervention that enhances end-of-life care by empowering clinicians to elicit and implement wishes for patients and their families. Many mixed-methods studies show how honouring each life and giving grieving families agency invokes a deeper sense of vocation among clinicians, aligning with high-quality end-of-life care. International evaluations found Dr. Cook’s 3 Wishes Project to be a valuable, transferrable, affordable, and sustainable intervention that identifies and meets the basic needs of dying patients by fostering personalized acts of compassion at times of unprecedented existential distress for those bearing witness to death – before and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

In recognition of her exceptional mentorship of innumerable successful early career investigators, the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group created the Deborah J Cook Mentorship award in her name.

“Dr. Deborah Cook is a peerless critical care scientist whose exceptional patient-centered research has improved outcomes for the sickest hospitalized patients around the world,” says Paul O’Byrne, dean and vice-president of the Faculty of Health Sciences. “By any metric, Dr. Cook is an inimitable clinician-researcher whose pioneering studies have had an indelible impact on patients, practice, and policy on a global scale. Congratulations to Deborah on this achievement and recognition.”