Community Based Primary Health Care Innovations 3rd Annual Meeting

November 25-26th, 2015

The Community Based Primary Health Care Innovations (CBPHC) 3rd Annual Meeting was co-hosted by the CIHR Institutes of Population and Public Health and Health Services and Policy Research in Ottawa, Ontario on November 25th and 26th, 2015. The meeting brought together CIHR funded CBPHC Innovation Teams, relevant New Investigators and Applied Public Health Chairs, and representatives from national health care organizations including Health Canada, the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Nurses Association, Accreditation Canada, and HealthCareCAN. This meeting provided participants an opportunity to critically reflect on progress, achievements, and impacts arising from Innovation Team's programs of research, including capacity building and knowledge translation activities. The meeting also provided a forum for knowledge exchange, critical debate and collaboration between Teams, salary awardees, decision-makers, and partners with a common interest.

Meeting Objectives

  • Critically reflect on progress, achievements and impacts arising from Teams and awardees' programs of research, capacity building and knowledge translation
  • Review preliminary mid-term program level evaluation results from 12 CBPHC Teams
  • Provide a forum for knowledge exchange, critical debate and collaboration between Teams, salary awardees, decision-makers and partners about issues of common interest (e.g. scaling up results for systems change; context and CBPHC)
  • Facilitate the further implementation of the CBPHC common indicators project

Meeting Highlights

Team Progress & Learnings

Representatives from all of the CBPHC Innovation Teams as well as several New Investigators and Applied Public Health Chairs presented updates from their program of research. Specifically highlighting challenges, achievements, and impacts from the past year. Many presenters stressed the importance of flexible timelines, building capacity with trainees, the importance of hosting workshops/symposium with collaborators, drawing on integrated knowledge translation approaches, accessing appropriate communication tools to communicate within and across teams as well as with stakeholders, and the opportunities and challenges associated with developing and sustaining partnerships.

Research outputs from the mid-term reports were presented, specifically the number of publications and presentations along with highlights about lessons learned to date related to governance, enablers and barriers to implementing cross-jurisdictional programs of research, capacity building and knowledge translation.

Scaling-Up Innovations

An initial discussion led by representatives from several health care organizations highlighted the importance of improving primary care, which can lead to better health outcomes at lower costs, and can improve health equity. In order to scale up research, it was emphasized that decision makers need information that can demonstrate value and need in a timely way, in order to take advantage of social and political opportunities. Researchers should look to build relationships with decision makers and proactively share information. It was agreed that there is a lack of capacity in intervention evaluation and that a future funding opportunity would be well-placed to study scale-up or scale-back of interventions.

There was discussion on understanding and measuring contextual features of CBPHC research, and the related implementation and scale-up of CBPHC models of care. Context descriptions need to be more robust and precise in CBPHC research. Participants agreed that researchers need to consider when and to what end we should measure things such as context, and recognize the importance of doing more than measuring certain aspects of an entire system.

Participants emphasized the need to understand factors at play in developing and influencing policy and to consider what governance models can optimize conditions. Participants were encouraged to think about the relationship of the research to people, patients, policy, and politics and to ensure that the research could be described and interpreted to those outside the research community.

The importance of continuing to develop the Pan-Canadian network was highlighted. Examples from the Quick Strike Project illustrates how to use Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and other data available through electronic medical records to examine key characteristics of a cohort of high system users. Through this data, definitions related to high system users can be developed. Therefore, the importance of building the infrastructure to collect and house this data, and develop methods to utilize it was discussed. A guide for creating a logic model was presented and all teams were encouraged to develop a model as it will be used in the framework for the common indicator analysis plan.

The next Community Based Primary Health Care Innovations meeting will be hosted in fall 2016.

For more updates related to the Community Based Primary Health Care program, please visit the CBPHC webpage.

Please contact CBPH-SSCPL@cihr-irsc.gc.ca if you would like to request a full copy of the Community Based Primary Health Care 2015 Meeting Report.

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