June 28, 2012
Background: Acute hospital discharge delays are a pressing concern for many health care administrators. In Canada, a delayed discharge is defined by the alternate level of care (ALC) construct and has been the target of many provincial health care strategies. Little is known on the patient characteristics that influence acute ALC length of stay. This study examines which characteristics drive acute ALC length of stay for those awaiting nursing home admission.
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Canada, Health care costs, Hospitals | No Comments
June 27, 2012
The Wait Time Alliance (WTA) has issued national report cards annually since 2007. Initially, our report cards were solely directed at provincial performance in the five areas identified in the 2004 Health Accord: cancer (radiation therapy); heart (bypass surgery); joint replacement (hip and knee); sight restoration (cataract) and diagnostic imaging (CT and MRI). Since then, the WTA has directed its attention
toward: (1) broadening the scope to include Canadians’ access to all areas of care; (2) improving the quality of public reporting on timely access; (3) highlighting issues that contribute to lengthy wait times; and, (4) identifying best practices to improve wait times.
The 2012 report card is the WTA’s most comprehensive effort to date to shed light on all of these areas.It contains six sections:
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Access to care, Benchmarking, Canada, Indicators, Wait lists | No Comments
June 22, 2012
Excerpt:
In this commentary, we hope to stimulate innovation in the field of health care performance measurement. We will discuss several considerations regarding the use of three quality indicators that are commonly used to improve accountability in the Canadian context. Specifically, we will focus on the hospital standardized mortality ratio (HSMR), all-cause urgent readmissions, and emergency department length of stay (ED-LOS; see Textbox 1). We discuss “the good,” “the bad,” and “the ugly” to illustrate both positive and negative consequences related to measurement. We conclude with specific recommendations regarding investments to improve quality measurement.
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Benchmarking, Canada, Indicators, Mortality rates, Program evaluation, Statistics & numerical data | No Comments
June 21, 2012
Introduction:
The objective of the Telehealth Adoption and Benefits Study was to inform Telehealth stakeholders, including funders of Telehealth programs, health system administrators, clinicians and patients, about the evidence of value of Telehealth activities in Canada. The study focused on the quality, access, and productivity benefits being achieved by these Telehealth activities.
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Canada, Telehealth | No Comments
June 18, 2012
Abstract:
Background: Many academic medical centres have introduced strategies to assess the productivity of faculty as part of compensation schemes. We conducted a systematic review of the effects of such strategies on faculty productivity.
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Canada, Efficiency, Health human resources, Hospital administration | No Comments
June 12, 2012
Abstract:
Although the general hospital remains an important place for stabilizing crises, most services for mental illnesses are provided in outpatient/community settings. In the absence of comprehensive data at the community level, data that are routinely collected from general hospitals can provide insights on the performance of mental health services for people living with mental illness or poor mental health. This article describes three new indicators that provide a snapshot on the performance of the mental health system in Canada: self-injury hospitalization rate, 30-day readmission rate for mental illness and percentage of patients with repeat hospitalizations for mental illness. Findings suggest a need for the early detection and treatment of mental illnesses and for optimal transitions between general hospitals and community services.
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Canada, Mental health, Statistics & numerical data | No Comments
June 11, 2012
Background:
Wait time targets are controversial since some claim that the push for improved efficiency could compromise patient safety. On the other hand, spending long hours waiting for care in an ED has itself been shown to have safety risks. We tested the question of whether ED patients, who arrived during a shift when a greater percentage of all ED patients seen on that shift met their respective MOHLTC ED LOS targets, had a lower risk of mortality or hospital admission in the 7 days following ED discharge. We looked only at outcomes among patients discharged from the ED, since subsequent outcomes among admitted patients could be due to in-patient, as opposed to ED, care.
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Canada, Hospitals, Wait lists | No Comments
June 8, 2012
This is the sixth issue of Patient Safety Papers, published by Longwoods. The first five issues, published since 2005, presented reports on research studies, demonstration projects and leading practices from organizations across Canada. In this issue, we assess our progress and examine the future. To do so, we asked a selection of patient safety experts from across this country to reflect on critical patient safety initiatives in specific domains.
Articles in this issue cover various aspects of patient safety, including:
- The use of reporting systems to enhance organizational learning and create safer systems
- How teamwork and communication can contribute to patient safety events
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Canada, Hospitals, Quality of care, Safety | No Comments
June 5, 2012
Health Council of Canada. (2012). Progress Report 2012: Health care renewal in Canada. Retrieved from http://healthcouncilcanada.ca/tree/ProgressReport2012_FINAL_EN.pdf Monitoring progress on the accords—the 2003 First Ministers’ Accord on Health Care Renewal1 and the 2004 10-Year Plan to Strengthen Health Care2—is a key element of the Health Council of Canada’s mandate. But the challenge is to determine how […]
Posted in 2014 Health Accord, READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Canada, Health care reform, Indicators, Policy, Primary health care | No Comments
May 28, 2012
“Abstract: The ratio of patients to physicians has long been used as a tool for measuring and planning healthcare resources in Canada. Some current changes in primary care, such as enrolment of patients with physicians, make this ratio easier to calculate, while others, such as changing practice structure, make it more complex to interpret. Based on information gleaned from a review of the literature, we argue that before panel size can be used as an accountability measure for individual physicians or practices in primary care, we must understand its relationship to quality and outcomes at individual and population levels, as well as the contextual factors that affect it.”
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Canada, Primary health care, Quality assessment, Quality of care | No Comments
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