To institute a standardized protocol for the assessment, surveillance and management of women admitted with a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy and to monitor the effect of the protocol on health outcomes, resource utilization, place of care, and family/social disruption.
Continue reading “An Integrated Approach to the Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy”
To develop capacity to measure, at a population level, transitions in seniors' health and requirements for care in order to evaluate (a) the effects of these transitions on seniors’ health outcome, quality of life and their utilization of health services and (b) the effects on service providers’ work life.
Continue reading “Closing the Knowledge Care Gap for Seniors and Community Care Collaborative”
To provide evidence and capacity building to support the integration of sustainable telehealth care services to support patient-focused homecare initiatives in the management of chronic disease.
To provide evidence to support and improve the integration of primary mental health care service delivery with specialist mental health services and community interventions and supports, including the development of integrated addiction and mental health services.
Continue reading “Mental Health and Addiction Services and Policy Investigative Team”
To develop a system for identifying objective safety-related outcome measures to assist in the design, implementation and evaluation of organizational changes (culture, human resources, care processes, etc) that will improve patient safety in BC's Intensive Care Units.
To determine how the practice of health professionals in rural and northern communities can best be organized, supported and developed to improve access to care and to enhance quality of care on a sustainable basis.
Continue reading “Rural and Northern Practice and its Development”
Critical Care depends on the coordination and collaboration of physicians, nurses, and other health professionals to deliver care that is efficient, effective, safe, and patient-centred. As patient perspectives are often difficult to elicit in critical care settings because of the severity of illness, patients’ families frequently become involved in decision-making and care. As a result, being ‘family-centred’ is an important part of being ‘patient-centred’ in critical care.
Sixteen percent of infants ≤32 weeks gestation admitted to Canadian neonatal intensive care units (NICU) acquire an infection while in the hospital, making nosocomial infections one of the most important causes of mortality, morbidity and resource use in the NICU. Previous efforts by individual NICUs to reduce the incidence of nosocomial infections often were not evidence-based, did not use data from the institutions concerned, and did not yield results that could easily be generalized for use in other NICUs.
Continue reading “National Health Partnership for Reducing Infections in NICU”
Workplace-related mental illness is becoming an increasingly serious problem across Canada and the provinces. The estimated cost of mental illness in Canadian workplaces is currently well over $20 billion, with $12 billion due to lost work days and $11 billion due to decreased productivity. In British Columbia, the healthcare industry is one of the more critical job sectors shouldering these costs, where workplace related mental illness currently accounts for 13% of successful long-term benefit claims by healthcare workers). The rise in disability and absences due to mental illness put greater stress on an already overburdened workforce that needs to remain health to provide quality patient care.
Continue reading “Developing Healthy Workplace Environments Within BC Healthcare”
Mental health and addiction services have experienced frequent budget cuts in recent years, as governments try to contain health care spending. Yet, as Dr. Shimi Kang discovered during her earlier research at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, substance use and mental illness are major global public health issues. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) has developed a software program for making treatment decisions that consider resource issues. The program prompts interviewers to ask a series of questions, and produces recommendations for matching patients to the most appropriate treatment setting, based on standardized criteria. The software is now widely used in the United States, and studied in several other countries. However, the effectiveness of this assessment tool has never been studied within the Canadian health care system or with women, who experience different rates of addictive disorders and mental illness than men. Shimi is conducting the first Canadian study to evaluate whether the program can be applied to assess the complex biological, psychological and social needs of women with mental health and addiction problems. The results may lead to better techniques for treating drug and alcohol addiction and preventing relapse in women.