Professor, Department of Medicine
Director, McGill Programs in Whole Person Care

Dr. Tom Hutchinson graduated with honours in Medicine from the National University of Ireland in 1971. He trained as an Internist and Nephrologist at McGill University from 1972-1976. From 1976 to 1978 he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale University with Dr. Alvan Feinstein. Dr. Feinstein led a revolution in medical research that included patients’ subjective experience and reported symptoms as a source of research data. In 1978 Dr. Hutchinson returned to McGill where he combined clinical practice of Nephrology and Internal Medicine with research on the clinical determinants of survival in patients with kidney failure. Concern for the lived experience of patients with kidney and other chronic diseases, as well as for their caregivers, led Dr Hutchinson to meet pioneering therapist Virginia Satir in 1986, to complete a 4 year training course in Family Therapy at the McGill Institute for Community Psychiatry in 1995 and to publish a book on the stories of kidney patients in 1998.

In 2002, in order to enlarge his focus on the quality of patients’ lived experience, Dr. Hutchinson changed his clinical practice to Palliative Medicine and joined Dr. Balfour Mount in developing McGill Programs in Whole Person Care. The Programs are aimed at enlarging the Western Health Care mandate from cure and prolongation of life to an equal concern with patients’ quality of life. The Programs seek to study, understand and promote the role of health care in relieving suffering and promoting healing in acute and chronic illness as a complement to the disease focus of biomedicine.