Elizabeth Smith is a Primary Care Nurse Practitioner with over 15 years of experience in a large interdisciplinary Family Health Team in London, Ontario, and more than two decades of progressive nursing leadership. She began her career as a Registered Nurse in acute, surgical, and transplant settings before advancing into primary care, where she built a strong foundation in clinical practice and system leadership.
For more than a decade, Elizabeth has served as Interprofessional Clinical Leader for a team of 24 NPs, providing strategic direction, mentoring colleagues, and fostering evidence-informed practice across multiple sites. She recently completed her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree, leading a project that repositioned NPs as Most Responsible Providers (MRPs), a model designed to improve access and continuity in the face of Ontario’s growing primary care crisis. Her work highlights the value of full-scope NP practice in creating sustainable, patient-centered care. Elizabeth is committed to advancing health system capacity through optimizing scope of practice for all providers, developing innovative models, and supporting policy change.
She champions data-driven leadership, leveraging performance indicators to guide quality improvement and demonstrate NP impact. Alongside her clinical and leadership roles, Elizabeth is an Adjunct Clinical Professor at Western University’s Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing, where she contributes to curriculum development and mentorship of future nursing leaders. Active in professional associations and advisory committees, she continues to champion NP-led models as essential to primary care renewal in Ontario.
