Deadline: 25-Sep-23
Healthcare Excellence Canada is now accepting applications from teams across the country for a new program focused on improving equitable access to safe, high-quality team-based primary care in northern, rural and remote communities.
This program will bring together providers and organizations who help deliver primary care in northern, rural, and remote communities to work together to advance their unique goals for improvement, while also sharing and learning with other primary care providers and organizations from across Canada.
This new program will help spread promising practices that are improving access to primary care in specific parts of the country and:
- Improve patient and provider experiences of care
- Make care safer, including more culturally safe
- Reduce avoidable emergency department visits
Benefits
- Participants will receive tailored support to implement or bolster a promising practice aimed at strengthening access to primary care in their communities, including:
- Seed funding (up to approximately $50,000 per team)
- Virtual and in-person networking, coaching, and learning events to promote pan-Canadian, regional, and community-level sharing and collaborations
- Resources and capability-building supports
- Measurement and evaluation support
- Opportunities to inform development of new team-based primary care resources
Activities and Deliverables
- Following HEC’s support to complete an application to participate in Phase 1 (July-September), and an invitation for successful applicants to join the program (October), programming will begin, whereby Phase 1 participants will:
- Participate in program activities, including one in-person meeting (design and structure to be determined depending on the participating organizations), and virtual networking and learning events such as regular meetings with HEC, regular online group meetings of the participating teams and potential site visits.
- Share and learn about promising practices and related policy enablers that increase access to team-based primary care closer to home, for example those that:
- leverage virtual care to improve access to care for more patients, including those without a care provider.
- enable team-based models of care to support providers’ well-being and capacity to work to their optimal scope to meet patient primary and specialty care needs.
- utilize methods to reduce medical transports, reduce avoidable ED visits and/or to enhance the appropriateness of care (where ED is not the community hub or location for primary provider practices).
- Identify their team’s readiness to adapt, spread and/or strengthen a promising practice or practices that enhance access to primary care services in partnership with local or regional communities and partners. Recognizing that no two communities are alike, participating organizations will be supported to create an implementation and evaluation plan to identify:
- what need(s) they want to address to improve access to primary care in their communities
- what promising practice they want to implement, spread and/or strengthen to help address their need(s)
- goals for improvement, and how to measure and evaluate progress toward these goals in partnership with their local communities and partners (e.g., reducing avoidable medical transports, reducing avoidable ED visits)
Eligibility Criteria
- HEC recognizes the strengths that local leadership and community organizations bring to support healthcare in northern, rural and remote settings. This program is intended to amplify those strengths and support partnerships that will enable the spread of promising practices to meet unique community and provider needs.
- Eligible primary care providers, organizations or communities can include, but are not limited to:
- Community-based organization(s) responsible for delivering primary and other healthcare services (e.g., rehabilitation, primary mental health care and substance use services, healthy child development and maternity care) in northern, rural, and remote communities. This can include a single organization or a team of organizations providing care in a province, territory, or health region. Partnerships with local community-based organizations and First Nations, Inuit and Métis organizations and communities are preferred.
- Regional health authorities, and/or provincial/territorial governments / Indigenous governments/organizations, in partnership with community-based organizations responsible for delivering primary care and other healthcare services in northern, rural, or remote communities.
- Municipalities and communities in partnership with community organizations responsible for delivering primary and other healthcare services within the community.
- Eligible providers, organizations and communities at all stages of the improvement journey are welcome, including those planning or implementing an initiative; or those with sustained results that are looking to reach more people.
- Applicants can include providers, single organizations or a team of organizations providing care in a province, territory, health region or community. In the case of a team application, a lead organization will be required to sign a collaboration agreement.
For more information, visit Healthcare Excellence Canada.