Prior to this he held a Personal Chair in Health Services Research at the University of Aberdeen, UK and was the Program Director of the Effective Professional Program within the Health Services Research, probably the largest implementation research program within the UK.  He has established a comparable program in Ottawa.  He has a full registration with the General Medical Council, member of the Royal College of General Practitioners (awarded with distinction) and Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

His research interests can be grouped into three themes.  Firstly systematic reviews professional, organisational, financial and regulatory interventions to improve professional and health care system performance.  He is the Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care group (which currently has 28 reviews and 25 protocols), has undertaken reviews of guideline dissemination and implementation strategies and overviews of published systematic reviews.  He has considerable experience of undertaking systematic reviews of complex interventions and has developed methods for searching for and assessing the quality of cluster randomised controlled trials and quasi experimental designs.  He organised a workshop on Complexity and Systematic Reviews for the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment in 1995 and has run similar workshops at Cochrane Colloquia. 

Secondly, he has considerable experience of the design, conduct and analysis of rigorous evaluations of dissemination and implementation strategies.  He has conducted 23 cluster randomised trials and two interrupted time series of different dissemination and implementation strategies.  These studies have been conducted in a wide range of settings (including community pharmacy settings, family medicine settings and secondary and tertiary care level settings) and have evaluated a wide range of interventions (for example, educational meetings, educational outreach, organisational interventions, computerised guidelines) relating to a wide range of behaviours.  The majority of these studies have incorporated economic evaluations. Through these studies, Dr Grimshaw has extensive experience of the design of dissemination and implementation strategies and methods to evaluate their impact. 

The third area of work relates to methodological developments.  Dr Grimshaw has undertaken methodological research into guideline development methods. He was Methodological Adviser to the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network and a member of the Guidelines Advisory Group for the National Institute of Clinical Excellence.  He has also collaborated in the development of guideline appraisal instruments, initially the ‘Cluzeau' instrument (rated most valid in an independent assessment of available appraisal instruments) and more recently the AGREE instrument.  He also collaborated with the Southern Californian EPC on an AHRQ funded project to develop a framework for assessing when guidelines need updating and appraise the existing AHCPR guidelines.  Dr Grimshaw has undertaken methodological studies of the design, conduct and analysis of cluster randomised trials.  He has also undertaken research into the applicability of behaviour change theories to professional behaviour and statistical issues in the design, conduct and analysis of cluster randomised trials.  He has also participated in a number of international collaborations to support wider development of implementation research.  He has also undertaken feasibility studies of different interventions.