ABSTRACT
"Pay fo performance" and "service-based funding" are fast-growing international trends, rapidly becoming dominant models in American and British healthcare. Now they're a bigger role in years to come. This reality led the Canadian Health Services Research foundation (CHSRF) to organize its third annual CEO forum on the subject in February 2009.
Subject(s)
Quality Assurance, Health Care/economics , Reimbursement, Incentive , Canada , National Health Programs , Quality Assurance, Health Care/standards , Reimbursement, Incentive/trendsABSTRACT
Evidence-informed decision-making supports high-quality, efficient healthcare. Programs such as SEARCH Classic (Swift Efficient Application of Research in Community Health) and EXTRA (Executive Training for Research Application) give health system decision-makers the skills and experience required to apply the best evidence to their work. But effectively leading change in how evidence comes to bear on the overall management and delivery of care requires strategies aimed at whole organizations and systems. The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF, EXTRA's managing organization) and SEARCH Canada (the SEARCH Classic program's managing organization) recently launched a jointly commissioned research study to assess organizational mechanisms and the impacts of these programs. Moving away from a focus on individual trainees and their immediate organizational connections, this evaluation builds on the evidence to date that leads to the hypothesis that a critical mass of highly educated, evidence-savvy decision-makers (senior executives in the case of EXTRA; middle- and front-line managers in the case of SEARCH Canada) enhance organizational capacity to use knowledge and ultimately lead to a more systematic use of evidence at the systems level (Champagne et al. 2008).
Subject(s)
Evidence-Based Medicine/methods , Canada , Delivery of Health Care/methods , Evaluation Studies as Topic , Evidence-Based Medicine/education , Health Services Research/methods , HumansSubject(s)
Health Facilities , Health Personnel , Occupational Exposure , Workplace , Canada , HumansABSTRACT
The Regional Training Centres (RTCs) have established a new, non-traditional model of applied health services research training. Graduates report that the programs provide an academic "home" where they can pursue their health and nursing services research interests while engaging with decision-makers. This discussion paper shares perspectives from eight RTC graduates about their lives and careers at the interface of applied health and nursing services research, policy and decision-making, in particular, training in a novel graduate program, building lasting connections among researchers, policy makers and managers and acting as liaisons among these communities. Graduates cite their exclusive access to a health services and policy network as an enticing feature of their training experience. They have forged careers that require work in both the research and decision-making realms, and clearly prefer having "a foot in both camps."
