National Symposium on Integrated Care – October 10, 2012: Register now!

We are hosting a national symposium to bring together policy makers, health system planners and administrators, health care providers, educators, researchers and people who use health services, to identify, share and promote the spread of innovative practices in integrated care.

Details

What: Advancing Integrated Health Care in Canada: Practices that Work (click here to see the agenda)

When: October 10, 2012                                  

Where: The Allstream Centre, Toronto, Ontario

Who: Keynote Speaker: The Honourable Fred Horne, Minister of Health Alberta

            Visiting international fellow: Dr. Dennis Kodner, The King’s Fund, London, UK

The event is open to all who have an interest in health services integration, and is free of charge; click here to register now as places are limited! Registration closes September 28, 2012 at 11:59 p.m.

Webinar: The Online Chronic Disease Self-Management Program – A good choice for Canada?

On Tuesday, September 18, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. EDT, Health Council of Canada councillor, Dr. Bruce Beaton will host a panel discussion on online chronic disease self-management programs which will expand upon many of the issues presented in our recent report, Self-Management Support for Canadians with Chronic Health Conditions: A Focus for Primary Health. 

Patrick McGowan, Associated Director of the University of Victoria’s Centre on Aging will explain how British Columbia has implemented the online Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (CDSMP), which has been in operation for two years.

A representative from Alberta Health Services Calgary will talk about Alberta's experience with an online CDSMP pilot project.  Finally, CDSMP pioneer, Dr. Kate Lorig, Director of the Stanford Patient Education Research Center in Stanford, California will tell us how the program has grown to be a respected and popular international tool for chronic disease self-management.

A question and answer period will follow the presentations. Register now!

For a healthier and more productive Canada, we need to focus on reducing inequities.

This week, the Canadian Medical Association held their annual meeting in Yellowknife, YT and released their 12^th Annual National Report Card on Health Care. Among the report’s key findings:

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• Canadians with lower incomes (household income under $30,000 per year) and lower levels of education are less likely to say they are in excellent health.
  
• Canadians with lower incomes and education levels are more likely to report being overweight, that their children are overweight and that they need to improve their eating habits.
  
• Awareness levels of the benefits of healthy eating are high but there are barriers to eating healthy.

In December 2010, we released Stepping It Up: Moving the Focus from Health Care in Canada to a Healthier Canada. The report noted that lower income Canadians are twice as likely to use health care services as those with the highest incomes and they are also more likely to suffer from chronic conditions like diabetes, arthritis and heart disease, to live with a disability, to be hospitalized for a variety of health problems, to suffer from mental distress and to die earlier.

Addressing the social determinants of health will require integrated government action, coordination across departments and agencies and across all levels of government, as well as collaboration with communities, researchers, and the non-profit and private sectors.

Spending on acute care and programs that encourage a healthy lifestyle are not enough to improve the overall health of Canadians, particularly those who live in or close to poverty. For a healthier and more productive population, we really need to focus on reducing inequities.

Related Articles:

• CMA Press Release: Income is the Great Divide When it Comes to Canadians' Health
• The Globe and Mail: Health status of poor deteriorating, poll shows
• The Toronto Star: Health status of poor deteriorating, poll shows
• NationTalk: CMA poll finds "worrisome" gap in income-related health status

Identifying and evaluating innovative practices

An article last week by Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, CIHR/Health Canada Research Chair in Health Human Resource Policy at the University of Ottawa and the lead of the pan Canadian Health Human Resources Network, discussed the innovations and promising practices discussed in the recent report, From Innovation to Action.

                                                                                                     

Bourgeault questioned how these practices were chosen as those which should be scaled up to improve health care in Canada overall. Was an evidence-based approach taken in the choice of these innovations? Are these truly new and innovative?

We have developed a set of criteria and an evaluation framework to support the identification of innovative practices that have been demonstrated to strengthen the health care system.

Our framework outlines three levels of innovative practices:

Leading: Practices with widely accepted evidence of having a positive impact, wide recognition and/or breadth of implementation.

Promising: Practices that are at intermediate stages of implementation; have some outcomes data showing positive impact, may have some recognition outside of original setting and outreach for implementation elsewhere.

Emerging: Practices that are in preliminary stages of development; may have little to no outcomes data collected, may not be widely recognized.

The framework uses evaluation criteria of outcomes and impact, recognisability, and applicability / transferability.

Check out the full framework and criteria on our website, and stay tuned for the launch of an online hub / database of innovative practices in the fall.