May 18, 2012
Cathie Scott & Laura Lagendyk. (2012). Contexts and Models in Primary Healthcare and their Impact on Interprofessional Relationships. Canadian Health Services Research Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.chsrf.ca/Libraries/Commissioned_Research_Reports/ScottLagendyk-April2012-E.sflb.ashx “Key Messages: Nationally and internationally, the need to effectively coordinate provision of care to meet the needs of patients and to make optimal use of resources have been identified […]
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Canada, Health planning, Integrated care, Patient-centered care | No Comments
April 16, 2012
“Sustainability seeks to balance and simultaneously optimize environmental, social and financial concerns. Sustainability in healthcare represents a particularly challenging undertaking as it necessarily encompasses the wide variety of facilities, operations and activities in a typical healthcare organization. This exploratory study examines the organizational approaches of eight healthcare systems with relatively successful sustainability initiatives.
The organizations studied have embraced sustainability as a core organizational value, and consequently have committed significant resources and personnel to support their sustainability efforts. Nonetheless, they have realized significant financial benefits from the efforts. Environmental resource management — especially energy and waste — serves as the initial and often central focus of many sustainability initiatives. Improving energy efficiency is associated with reduced operating costs, as is increasing recycling and more carefully managing all waste streams. Managing energy and waste more sustainably was, for these health care organizations, critical for building organizational capabilities that could be applied to other areas, such as environmentally responsible purchasing and food management. Most of the organizations created new positions or hired new people to help manage and coordinate the sustainability initiatives. The sustainability coordinators are charged with identifying focus areas, developing sustainability-related goals, tracking performance, integrating environmental and social concerns into organizational processes, identifying significant external resources and helping to build important sustainability-related organizational capabilities.”
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Health care reform, Health planning, Hospital administration | No Comments
March 12, 2012
“Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) is often criticized for lacking rigour, providing a weak basis for generalization of its findings and, therefore, offering limited value for policy-makers. This Reader aims to address these concerns through supporting action to strengthen the quality of HPSR.
The Reader is primarily for researchers and research users, teachers and students, particularly those working in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It provides guidance on the defining features of HPSR and the critical steps in conducting research in this field. It showcases the diverse range of research strategies and methods encompassed by HPSR, and it
provides examples of good quality and innovative HPSR papers.
The production of the Reader was commissioned by the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research (the Alliance) and it will complement its other investments in methodology development and postgraduate training.”
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Health planning, Policy, Public health | No Comments
March 8, 2012
“What You Will Find In This Document:
Within the “Health Promotion and Population Health” resource list, you will find a variety of information from provincial, national and international sources on the topic population health. This resource list is organized into five sections: Overview, Documents, Organizational Links, Other Tools and Resources, and Funding Opportunities. A brief description of each section is included below:
- Overview provides a general description of the topics represented in this resource list.
- Documents is made up of toolkits and reports that are available online.
- Organizational Links lists relevant provincial, national and international groups affiliated with population health.
- Other Tools and Resources includes key websites, databases, and portals related to population health.
- Funding Opportunities is a list of organizations that provide financial assistance to organizations promoting health across the population.”
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Canada, Funding, Health planning | No Comments
February 21, 2012
“Introduction: The role of ICU design and particularly single-patient rooms in decreasing bacterial transmission between ICU patients has been debated. A recent change in our ICU allowed further investigation.
Methods: Pre-move ICU-A and pre-move ICU-B were open-plan units. In March 2007, ICU-A moved to singlepatient rooms (post-move ICU-A). ICU-B remained unchanged (post-move ICU-B). The same physicians cover both ICUs. Cultures of specified resistant organisms in surveillance or clinical cultures from consecutive patients staying >48 hours were compared for the different ICUs and periods to assess the effect of ICU design on acquisition of resistant organisms.
Results: Data were collected for 62, 62, 44 and 39 patients from pre-move ICU-A, post-move ICU-A, pre-move ICUB and post-move ICU-B, respectively. Fewer post-move ICU-A patients acquired resistant organisms (3/62, 5%) compared with post-move ICU-B patients (7/39, 18%; P = 0.043, P = 0.011 using survival analysis) or pre-move ICUA patients (14/62, 23%; P = 0.004, P = 0.012 on survival analysis). Only the admission period was significant for acquisition of resistant organisms comparing pre-move ICU-A with post-move ICU-A (hazard ratio = 5.18, 95% confidence interval = 1.03 to 16.06; P = 0.025). More antibiotic-free days were recorded in post-move ICU-A (median = 3, interquartile range = 0 to 5) versus post-move ICU-B (median = 0, interquartile range = 0 to 4; P = 0.070) or pre-move ICU-A (median = 0, interquartile range = 0 to 4; P = 0.017). Adequate hand hygiene was observed on 140/242 (58%) occasions in post-move ICU-A versus 23/66 (35%) occasions in post-move ICU-B (P < 0.001).
Conclusions: Improved ICU design, and particularly use of single-patient rooms, decreases acquisition of resistant bacteria and antibiotic use. This observation should be considered in future ICU design.”
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Health planning, Hospital administration, Prevention and control | No Comments
January 23, 2012
“This study of health care cost drivers is a companion to CIHI’s annual report on
national health expenditure trends. With the expiry of the 2004 health accord
within the next three years, Canadians need a better understanding of the
underlying drivers of health care costs. This report presents a summary of CIHI’s
analysis of data and sheds light on the underlying factors that explain recent
trends in public-sector health spending.
It is first useful to put recent health spending growth into perspective by looking
at trends over a longer period of time. It should be noted that there have been
variations in the pace of health spending growth over the last 35 years. The growth
of public-sector health spending since 1975 can be divided into three phases: a
growth phase from 1976 to 1991; a short period of retrenchment and disinvestment
from 1992 to 1996, when governments dealt with fiscal deficits; and a growth
phase that averaged 3.5% per year, after adjusting for inflation, from 1997 until
2008, during which time health care became a top priority for Canadians. During
this latter period, major investments were made in health care, including spending
on physicians, drugs, hospitals and advanced diagnostics.
This study examines the growth in spending from 1998 to 2008 that is
attributable to underlying health care cost drivers, principally demographics
(population growth and aging), price inflation, technology and utilization.”
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Canada, Forecasting, Health care costs, Health planning | No Comments
December 7, 2011
“For hospital governance to be eff ective, it must incorporate two powerful and well-developed lines of health sector logic: on the one hand, national health policy and objectives; on the other, operational hospital management. One sphere is political, the other is technical. One is subjective and value based, the other is objective, with performance that can be measured both clinically and financially. Th e challenge for hospital-level governance is to integrate these two disparate logics into a coherent and eff ective institutional-level strategy.”
This study explores key developments in public hospital governance in Europe. In doing so, it highlights the central role of hospital-level decision-making and how it is shaped by the various participants and stakeholders. In particular, it examines the degree to which granting an individual hospital the ability to make its own strategic, financial and clinical decisions – to become semi-autonomous within the public sector – may improve institutional-level functioning and outcomes.
In the initial chapters of this study, we draw on a substantial body of literature in a number of related health policy, public management and institutional governance arenas. How these diff erent concepts might apply to public hospitals is the subject of considerable discussion here. It is in the interface of these diff ering conceptual approaches, with the evidence and experience seen in the eight country cases, that we catch a glimpse of the future of public hospital governance in Europe. We hope that this study can serve as a solid conceptual and practical contribution to future quantitative as well as qualitative research on this important subject.”
Click here to read the full article
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Health care reform, Health planning, Hospital administration | No Comments
October 28, 2011
This white paper introduces an overall approach and tools designed to support two processes: the proactive preparation of a plan for managing serious clinical adverse events, and the reactive emergency response of an organization that has no such plan.
Every day, clinical adverse events occur within our health care system, causing physical and psychological harm to one or more patients, their families, staff (including medical staff), the community, and the organization. In the crisis that often emerges, what differentiates organizations, positively or negatively, is their culture of safety, the role of the board of trustees and executive leadership, advanced planning for such an event, the balanced prioritization of the needs of the patient and family, staff, and organization, and how actions immediately and over time bring empathy, support, resolution, learning, and improvement. The risks of not responding to these adverse events in a timely and effective manner are significant, and include loss of trust, absence of healing, no learning and improvement, the sending of mixed messages about what is really important to the organization, increased likelihood of regulatory action or lawsuits, and challenges by the media.
The development of this white paper was motivated by three objectives:
- Encourage and help every organization to develop a clinical crisis management plan before they need to use it;
- Provide an approach to integrating this plan into the organizational culture of quality and safety, with a particular focus on patient- and family-centered care and fair and just treatment for staff; and
- Provide organizations with a concise, practical resource to inform their efforts when a serious adverse event occurs in the absence of a clinical crisis management plan and/or culture of quality and safety.
Click here to read the full article
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Health planning, Safety | 1 Comment
September 15, 2011
In this paper, the BCMA examines the challenges of physician workforce planning through the lens of the medical career lifecycle. Each stage—medical student, resident, practicing physician, and near-retirement—offers opportunities for stakeholders to improve current policy and understanding on the individual choices that physicians make about what, how, and where they practice. Doing so will align physician resource planning more closely with the population’s need for health care services. Some of these can be implemented immediately by the government. For example, an increase in the number of government-funded residency positions would add greater flexibility in the postgraduate training system and allow opportunities for re-entry and enhanced skills training for practicing physicians. Others will take longer.
Click here to read the entire article.
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Health human resources, Health planning | No Comments
June 30, 2011
“Medicare has enjoyed the resounding support of Canadians for nearly half a century. But new times bring new challenges to the health care system and so it has been forced from time to time to adapt and evolve. This document is predicated on the belief of the CMA that new demands for adaptation must be addressed starting now, and in a manner consistent with the spirit and principles that have guided Medicare from the beginning.”
“This report is divided into three Parts. The first lays out the underlying problem confronting the system; the second outlines a vision for Canada’s health system by modernizing the guiding principles of Medicare, and the third provides the CMA’s prescription for improving the system within and beyond the five original principles that are set out in the Canada Health Act (universality, accessibility, comprehensiveness, portability and public administration).”
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Access to care, Canada, Health care reform, Health planning | No Comments
