Resources

Mobile medicine is everywhere. There's the iPhone app that lets you cut away images of muscle layers to see what lies beneath, an e-health record system for the iPad, and a smartphone-based blood pressure monitor. Here are a dozen innovative ones.

When you decide to be a nurse, chances are that you made the decision in order to help people. You can be a great help to people when you better understand how to treat them. The good news is that there are a number of tutorial sites available so that you can learn about being a better health care professional.

Health care professionals can use the Internet as a resource. From information about different diseases and conditions, to case studies, to creating treatment plans, to understanding health care law and ethics. You can learn a lot about health care and improved outcomes by looking online. If you are interested in becoming a better nurse, you can use these 40 tutorial sites for information and help:

General Information, Reference and Tutorials

If you are looking for general information on health care, you can visit these web sites. This information can include reference resources and tutorials related to general health care subjects. These great resources can help you become a better nurse.
  

For new nurses, the world of healthcare, hospitals, and more can be overwhelming. And a degree, certification, and license can only do so much. This is why getting advice from someone with experience can be a life saver.

With that in mind, below are the 50 best blogs for new nurses. Whether looking locally or overseas, from a man or woman, or looking to work in a specific area of medicine, they can help immensely.
  

People and Processes reflects leading practices and lessons learned for managing change in eHealth projects from across Canada. Based on this experience, this guide and toolkit has been developed as:

• a support for change management (CM) leaders and practitioners working within eHealth, particularly for jurisdictional level and large institutional projects and programs.
• a useful resource for front line clinicians, managers and senior leaders with a project implementation / quality / risk focus.
• an introductory resource for individuals with CM as part of their role but who may not yet have any formal education.

McMaster University's Evidence-Based Practice Centre

Invited presentation .pdf of short course on systematic reviews

• To understand the terms ‘systematic review’ and ‘meta-analysis’
• To be familiar with different types of reviews (advantages/disadvantages)
• To understand the complexities of reviews of health systems and health services

These Resource Centres have been developed in collaboration with parents and experts at The Hospital for Sick Children, and are offered to families in partnership with BC Children's Hospital.

The U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality created the Health Care Innovations Exchange to speed the implementation of new and better ways of delivering health care. The Innovations Exchange supports the Agency's mission to improve the quality of health care and reduce disparities.

The Innovations Exchange helps you solve problems, improve health care quality, and reduce disparities.

• Find evidence-based innovations and QualityTools.
• View new innovations and tools published biweekly.
• Learn from experts through events and articles.

Aporia is dedicated to scholarly debates in nursing and the health sciences. The journal is committed to a pluralistic view of science and to the blurring of boundaries between disciplines. Aporia encourages the use of a wide range of epistemologies, philosophies, theoretical perspectives and research methodologies. In the critical analyses of health-related matters, Aporia advocates and embraces a wide range of epistemologies, philosophies and theories including but not limited to: cultural studies, feminism(s), neo-marxism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and queer studies.

NIOSH Science Blog

Nursing assistants are a critical part of the dedicated staff who work day and night in nursing homes to keep residents safe, secure, cared-for, and comfortable. Yet the very workers ensuring the safety of our seniors are themselves at risk for workplace violence and assaults.

Recent NIOSH research based on the first large, nationally representative sample of nursing assistants reported that that nursing assistants in nursing homes have a high rate of work-related physical injuries from assault.1 Overall, 35% of nursing assistants reported physical injuries resulting from aggression by residents, and 12% reported experiencing a human bite during the year before the interview. Nursing assistants employed at nursing homes with special units for Alzheimer patients had a significantly elevated risk for assault injuries and human bites (37% reported injuries from assaults and 13% reported human bites).
  

Following on from the lists of academic tweeters published earlier this month, we have put together a short guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities, available to download as a PDF or view on Issuu.

How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

We have put together a short guide answering these questions, showing new users how to get started on Twitter and hone their tweeting style, as well as offering advice to more experienced users on how to use Twitter for research projects, alongside blogging, and for use in teaching.
  

The BC Child & Youth Health Research Network (CYHRNet) supports the development of a more vigorous, integrated and collaborative research environment for BC's child and youth health researchers. CYHRNet aims to raise research to a new level of innovation and excellence and strengthen researchers' capacity to compete for national and international funding.

The BC Health Quality Matrix is a framework aimed at providing a common language and understanding about health care quality.While the BC Health Quality Matrix is based on well-known frameworks in Canada and the USA, it has been customized to the BC context by the BC Patient Safety & Quality Council’s Health Quality Network.2 The intent of the BC Health Quality Matrix is that it may be used by health care delivery organizations, leaders and practitioners for strategic planning, quality improvement program planning, measurement and evaluation at a program, facility and system-wide level.

The purpose of the British Columbia Patient Safety & Quality Council is to provide advice and make recommendations to the Minister of Health Services on matters related to patient safety and quality of care, and to bring health system stakeholders together in a collaborative partnership to promote and inform a provincially coordinated, innovative, and patient-centred approach to patient safety and quality improvement in British Columbia.

This Briefing looks at the role and value of research, in particular health services research, and explores the virtues and rewards to NHS organisations of being a good research partner.

In November 2010, The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) commissioned the leadership team of John W. Creswell, Ann Klassen, Vicki L. Plano Clark, and Katherine Clegg Smith to develop a resource that would provide guidance to NIH investigators on how to rigorously develop and evaluate mixed methods research applications. Pursuant to this, the team developed a report of "best practices" following three major objectives.

To develop practices that:

• assist investigators using mixed methods as they develop competitive applications for support from NIH;
• assist reviewers and staff for review panels at NIH who evaluate applications that include mixed methods research;
• provide the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), and the NIH Institutes and Centers, with "best practices" to use as they consider potential contributions of mixed methods research, select reviewers, plan new initiatives, and set priority areas for their science.

OBSSR convened a Working Group of 19 individuals (see Appendix A. NIH Working Group on Developing Best Practices for Mixed Methods Research) to review a preliminary draft of "best practices". This Group was comprised of experienced scientists, research methodologists, and NIH health scientists. These individuals were selected because of their expertise in NIH investigations, their specific knowledge of mixed methods research, and their experience in the scientific review process. The composition of the Working Group was diverse with members representing fields such as public health, medicine, mental health professions, psychology, sociology, anthropology, social work, education, and nursing. This Working Group met in late April 2011, and reviewed and made recommendations for the final document presented in this report.

Physicians need rapid access to the best current evidence on a wide range of clinical topics. But where to find it? Textbooks are frequently out-of-date, and we don't have the time to perform literature reviews while the patient is waiting.

BETs were developed in the Emergency Department of Manchester Royal Infirmary, UK, to provide rapid evidence-based answers to real-life clinical questions, using a systematic approach to reviewing the literature. BETs take into account the shortcomings of much current evidence, allowing physicians to make the best of what there is. Although BETs initially had an emergency medicine focus, there are a significant number of BETs covering cardiothoracics, nursing, primary care and paediatrics.

Each year, more than 3 million people receive care in nursing homes – a 10% increase over the past 10 years. As this population has grown, we have seen a decline in another area – a 16% drop in the number of nursing home beds. How can more people be receiving care when beds are decreasing?

BMJ Open is an online-only, open access general medical journal, dedicated to publishing medical research from all disciplines and therapeutic areas. The journal publishes all research study types, from study protocols to phase I trials to meta-analyses, including small or potentially low-impact studies. Publishing procedures are built around fully open peer review and continuous publication, publishing research online as soon as the article is ready.

BMJ Open aims to promote transparency in the publication process by publishing reviewer reports and previous versions of manuscripts as pre-publication histories. Authors are asked to pay article-processing charges on acceptance; the ability to pay does not influence editorial decisions.
  

This article aims at advancing the still on-going conversations about the so-called research/practice gap. Some academics argue that it is not possible to develop knowledge that is both academically valuable and helpful for practice, while others hold the opposite view, justifying it on the basis of works published in top tier journals. The paper argues that the main reason scholars hold such contradictory views on this topic central to management science is the lack of explicitness of a number of founding assumptions which underlie their discourses, in particular the lack of explicitness of the epistemological framework in which the parties’ arguments are anchored.

The paper presents methodological guidelines for elaborating scientific knowledge both from and for practice, and illustrates how to use these guidelines on examples from a published longitudinal research project. In order to avoid the lack of explicitness pitfall, the paper specifies scientific and epistemological frameworks in which the knowledge elaborated in this methodological approach, when properly justified, can be considered as legitimate scientific knowledge.
  

A special issue of Healthcare Policy articulates the experiences, successes, challenges and lessons learned in the RTC journey.
  

This report marks the culmination of the Nursing Sector Study. The five year study consisted of two phases, and examined the nursing workforce for all three regulated nursing professions in Canada (Licensed Practical Nurses (LPN) Registered Nurses (RN), and Registered Psychiatric Nurses (RPN)). Phase I, which concluded in December 2004, examined the state of nursing human resources in Canada. A series of 15 technical research reports were completed which covered areas such as nursing mobility, the international labour market, nursing education in Canada, and many others.

The Collaborative secured its first project funding from the 2008 Knowledge Translation Competition as advanced by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The knowledge synthesis was conducted from January 2009 to January 2010 and examined current evidence on the impact of IPE and collaborative practice on HHR outcomes.

We synthesized the evidence from a number of sources such as the peer-reviewd literature, reports from governments and other agencies and reports from projects conducted under Health Canada’s Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient-Centred Practice (IECPCP) initiative.

Four areas of impact emerged:

1. Workplace quality
2. Provider satisfaction
3. Student clinical placement & graduate employment choice
4. Cost benefits

The executive summary and full synthesis report is now available.

The purpose of CANR is to foster research-based nursing practice and practice-based nursing research by:

• providing information about research studies, methods, funding and other resources
• strengthening linkages between research, education, administration,and clinical practice
• representing members' interests to governments, funding agencies, and other nursing organizations
• recognizing excellence in research activities
• educating professionals and the public about the significance of the nursing research-practice partnership

Public Health Agency of Canada's Best Practices Portal

Your first step to planning health-related programs. The Portal is a virtual front door to community and population health interventions related to chronic disease prevention and health promotion.
  

This year's Canadian Health Accreditation Report focuses on governance and its relationship to quality and patient safety. Data collected from the application of Accreditation Canada's Governance Standards and the Governance Functioning Tool survey for board members provide a comprehensive picture of governance in Canadian health care.
  

CHSRF's reports and papers related to health services research.

Understanding how hospital financial information changes over time is critical to evaluating hospital performance. Canadian MIS Database, Hospital Financial Performance Indicators, 1999-2000 to 2008-2009 reports on regional level hospital performance using 2008-2009 data. This report is an update to information previously reported in Canadian MIS Database, Hospital Financial Performance Indicators 1999-2000 to 2008-2009. CIHI will continue to monitor the ongoing feasibility of using data from the CMDB in the future to produce and report any additional indicators

The indicators that are used in this report are:

• Total Margin
• Current Ratio
• Administrative Expense as a Percentage of Total Expense
• Information Systems as a Percentage of Total Expense
• Cost per Weighted Case
• Unit-producing Personnel Worked Hours for Patient Care Functional Centres as a Percentage of Total Worked Hours
• Nursing Inpatient Services Unit-producing Personnel Worked Hours per Weighted Case
• Diagnostic Services Unit-producing Personnel Worked Hours per Weighted Case
• Clinical Laboratory Unit-producing Personnel Worked Hours per Weighted Case
• Pharmacy Unit-producing Personnel Worked Hours per Weighted Case
• Average Age of Equipment

CNA encourages the integration of current knowledge into practice environments conducive to quality nursing care. Nursing policy develops national policies on nursing issues such as advanced nursing practice and the nurse practitioner and is involved in a number of initiatives on behalf of nurses. One such project is Achieving Excellence in Professional Practice, a resource guide offering nurses and other professionals assistance in developing or reviewing existing standards.

The PEBC’s evidence-based guidelines and standards are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as on CCO’s web site. Cancer Care Ontario built on the PEBC’s well-established expertise in producing clinical guidelines for the care of individual patients to include the development of organizational and system standards that set expectations for organizations delivering cancer services in terms of personnel, expertise, facilities and services.

Cancer View Canada connects Canadians to online services, information and resources for cancer control.

It is an ever-evolving portal that brings together resources for cancer prevention, screening, treatment, and supportive, palliative and end-of-life care.

Through its collaborative tools, Cancer View Canada also links people in the Canadian cancer community to each other.

In this section you will find cancer control resources to help those working in the health system.

Center for Disease Control moderated blog written by a team of health care professionals on health care safety topics.

Safe Patient Handling

Overextension incidents are the leading source of workers’ compensation claims and costs in healthcare settings. The primary outcome associated with such incidents are musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). MSD risks are found in housekeeping, food service and other areas where workers manually handle heavy, awkward loads or perform repetitive forceful hand work. The single greatest risk factor for MSDs in healthcare workers is the manual moving and repositioning of patients, residents or clients. Rising obesity rates in the United States1 impact the physical demands on caregivers. The aging of the workforce likely contributes to the problem; the average age of a registered nurse in the U.S. is approximately 47 years. Also contributing to the negative health consequences of manual handling is the shortage of nurses—Peter Buerhaus, a researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has estimated that there will be a shortage of 250,000 nurses by the year 2025 in the US.
  

Disinfectants and cleaners are essential products for preventing disease transmission in healthcare facilities, but they pose risks for work-related eye and respiratory irritation, sensitization, asthma-like symptoms, and respiratory distress for workers. A NIOSH study published in the May 14, 2010 Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report provides the first multistate report on work-related symptoms among healthcare staff in three states, with recommendations for preventing illness and injury.

The Center for Health Systems Research and Analysis (CHSRA) was formed in 1973 as a collaborative effort between the departments of Industrial Engineering and Preventive Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At CHSRA, researchers seek to improve long-term care and health systems by creating performance measures and developing information and decision support systems. CHSRA research and development projects serve a variety of audiences.

The goal of this website is to help develop, disseminate, and evaluate resources that can be used to practise and teach EBM for undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing education for health care professionals from a variety of clinical disciplines.

The overall aim of the project was to understand the nature of changing management cultures in the NHS and explore their relationships with changing organisational performance. Specifically we sought to:
- identify and classify the extant cultures in key NHS organisations;
- explore how these cultures evolve and transform over time, both in response to external policies and as a result of internal or cross-boundary drivers;
- analyse the (longitudinal) relationships between changes in culture and performance at both an organisational and a local health economy level.

Insight and Action is a monthly digest that shares knowledge about knowledge exchange.

This series of 19 articles describes processes for ensuring that relevant research is identified, appraised and used to inform decisions about health policies and programs. The tools were written for people responsible for health policy decision-making (e.g., health system managers and policy-makers) and for those who support them.

Welcome to the CIHC Library!

New! Two fact sheets describing the CIHC Library to our core user groups.

Please take a look at "CIHC Library for…"

•Health Professionals
•Researchers and Students

The CIHC Library is an electronic library designed to help those searching for information on interprofessional education, collaborative practice and patient-centred care. We accommodate a wide range of interprofessional resources such as curricula, how-to materials, references, research & evaluation instruments, and other communications material. Feel free to browse our collections, or to enter a search term. Please also view the About the Library collection for additional information!

This is a new resource, and we'd love to hear what you think! Please do not hesitate to contact us at library@cihc.ca with your questions, comments or suggestions.

Articles in the CIHC Library are available for download within each record, usually in .pdf format. You will need a .pdf reader, such as Adobe Acrobat, to read these files.
  

At CIHR, knowledge translation (KT) is defined as a dynamic and iterative process that includes synthesis, dissemination, exchange and ethically-sound application of knowledge to improve the health of Canadians, provide more effective health services and products and strengthen the health care system. This page provides links to CIHR KTE resources.

Increasingly, there is a growing demand for advanced practice nursing (APN) in Canada and around the world. As clinical experts, leaders and change agents, APNs are recognized as an important human resource strategy for improving access to high-quality, cost-effective and sustainable models of healthcare.

This special report was commissioned by CHSRF to develop a better understanding of the roles of APNs, the contexts in which they are currently being used, and the health system factors that influence the effective integration of advanced practice nursing in the Canadian healthcare system. Three types of APNs were the focus of this report: clinical nurse specialists (CNSs), primary healthcare nurse practitioners (PHCNPs), and acute care nurse practitioners (ACNPs).

This database offers free access to the abstracts and, where available, the plain language summaries of all Cochrane systematic reviews. Links to the full-text versions are available on each page.

The Cochrane Collaboration prepares Cochrane Reviews and aims to update them regularly with the latest scientific evidence. Members of the organisation (mostly volunteers) work together to provide evidence to help people make decisions about health care. Some people read the healthcare literature to find reports of randomised controlled trials; others find such reports by searching electronic databases; others prepare and update Cochrane Reviews based on the evidence found in these trials; others work to improve the methods used in Cochrane Reviews; others provide a vitally important consumer perspective; and others support the people doing these tasks. The Cochrane Collaboration website provides information on a variety of ways of registering interest or becoming directly involved.

University Health Network (UHN) became a demonstration site to test a health human resource planning model to foster inter-organizational collaboration, knowledge transfer and exchange of nurses between an urban academic health science centre and a remote region in northern Ontario. Funding support was provided by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The partnership between UHN, Weeneebayko Health Ahtuskaywin (WHA) and James Bay General Hospital (JBGH) addressed retention, recruitment, professional practice development, planning and succession planning objectives. The primary goal of this partnership was to supply the staffing needs of WHA/JBGH with UHN nurses at a decreased cost for four- to six-week placement periods. This resulted in a marked decrease in agency use by approximately 40% in the WHA site during the months UHN nurses were practicing in the north, with an overall agency cost savings of $165,000 reported in the pilot year.

Community Solutions Planning and Evaluation
Consulting for Nonprofit and Public Sector Organizations
The website link provides a list of services provided and of past clients and some of their testimonials.

The mission of the EI Consortium is to advance research and practice of emotional and social intelligence in organizations through the generation and exchange of knowledge. The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations is currently made up of 8 core members and 56 additional members who are individuals with a strong record of accomplishment as applied researchers in the field. There also are six organizational and corporate members. The Consortium was founded in the spring of 1996 with the support of the Fetzer Institute. Its initial mandate was to study all that is known about emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Wise Mapping is the web mind mapping tool that leverages the power of Mind Maps mixing new technologies like HTML 5.0 and SVG

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making.

It is an image-centered diagram that represents semantic or other connections between portions of information. By presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, it encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an intrinsically appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within.

A mind map is similar to a semantic network or cognitive map but there are no formal restrictions on the kinds of links used.

The elements are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts and they are organized into groupings, branches, or areas. The uniform graphic formulation of the semantic structure of information on the method of gathering knowledge, may aid recall of existing memories.

If we conceptualize knowledge translation (KT) as an ever-turning cycle of policy-informed research leading to evidence-informed policy, then priority setting is where this cycle often begins to move. A singular KT tool in identifying policy needs and research options, deliberative priority setting selects the right people to brainstorm on the right issues to determine what a society's, a system's, or an institution's priorities are. Exactly how we determine the "right people," select the "right issues," and arrive at a set of fair and inclusive priorities is the subject of this Module.

The Workplace Health Research Laboratory (WHRL) at Brock University gathers, analyzes, reports and interprets the information that HR professionals and senior management need to build productive and engaged workforces.

This is a presentation to the 2008 Ontario University Registrar's Association Annual Conference.

This report focuses on health authority quality and safety leaders; those responsible for leading and supporting improvement initiatives. It provides a snapshot of their skills, abilities and professional development needs and explores some of the ways these needs are being met in other jurisdictions. Based on these findings, some options are presented for the BCPSQC to consider to support the health authorities as they build capacity for patient safety and quality improvement.

The goal of our study is to investigate productivity change in the hospital sector as well as its key
components: efficiency change and technological change. To study these questions we use recent
advances in productivity analysis—non-parametric (kernel-based) statistical analysis of distributions
of productivity scores and their components obtained from the Malmquist Productivity index (MPI)
through application of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimator.

The Electronic Health Library of BC provides the academic and health care community of British Columbia with easy access to online health library resources. The purpose of the e-HLbc is to support and improve practice, education, and research in the health sciences.

Member organizations include all publicly funded BC post-secondary institutions providing health education, the BC Ministry of Advanced Education, the BC Ministry of Health, the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development, all BC Health Authorities, and the BC College of Physicians and Surgeons.

The Erasmus Observatory on Health Law was founded to explore health law, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. We represent a network of faculties, students, fellows, lawyers and ethicists working to identify and engage with the challenges and opportunities of health law.

We investigate the real and possible boundaries in health law. We do this through active rather than passive research, believing that the best way to understand health law is to actually build out into it.
  

PowerPoint presentation from Session 904 - Building a "Super" Logic Model: Development of a System of Tiered Logic Models to Identify Key Outcomes in a Large Nonprofit Organization

Expert Lecture Sponsored by the Presidential Strand Chair - Gail Barrington, Barrington Research Group Inc Presenter - Melanie Barwick, The Hospital for Sick Children Discussant - Daniel Stufflebeam, Western Michigan University

Presentation

Nurse Practitioners (NPs)

In a review of studies comparing the primary care provided by NPs to primary care provided by physicians (MDs), researchers found that patients of both groups had comparable health outcomes. NPs were found to out perform MDs in measures of consultation time, patient follow-up, and patient satisfaction (Naylor and Kurtzman 2010).

Two recent international systematic reviews report no differences between patients treated by NPs and MDs in terms of health outcomes, type of care provided, or resources used. They also found patients seeing NPs were more satisfied and had longer consultations (Horrocks et al., 2002; Laurant et al., 2008).

Systematic reviews and syntheses of evidence are increasingly used to inform public policy decisions. Growing budgetary pressures mean that decision makers often need to consider evidence on the costs and efficiency of alternatives as well as their effects. There are a number of methodological challenges in the identification, appraisal, synthesis, interpretation and use of economic evidence. This article draws on a recently published edited volume to review the latest developments, proposals and controversies in these aspects of economic evidence synthesis methodology. It focuses on two broad classes of approach: systematic review to summarize and compare the findings of existing economic analyses and synthesis of new economic results using decision models. The availability and scope of economic evidence is currently limited in many fields, but improving. Increased engagement between economists, the wider evidence synthesis community, and decision makers is needed to improve both the production and use of economic evidence. Further research to improve the evidence base that underpins application of economic evidence synthesis methodology will need to embrace a broader range of methods than economic evaluation and systematic review alone.

This website provides a collection of links to evidence-based practice, including:

• Resources
• Reviews
• Guidelines
• Critiques
• Calculators
• Statistics
• Research Centres
• Literature

Tools and Resources

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins is dedicated to providing healthcare professionals with the information they need to improve practice and improve patient outcomes. The Evidence-Based Practice Network team has pulled together a collection of articles and journals from Lippincott publications, from a variety of disciplines, in order to provide you with credible, reliable information in which to base your practice.

Between 2000 and 2005, the incidence of hospitalizations for Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) nearly doubled. So did the fatality rate from this infection. Risk factors for CDI (such as the use of certain antibiotics and gastric acid suppressors, age over 65, and hospitalization) are so common that CDI poses a continuing danger.

To help reduce that danger, recent research has identified ways for you and your colleagues to prevent and manage CDI, including these evidence-based guidelines
  

ARE HOSPITAL FUNDING MECHANISMS IN CANADA DESIGNED TO PROVIDE EFFICIENT CARE?
Canadian governments are spending more on healthcare than ever. Driven by technological innovation, population aging, inflation and other factors, public healthcare expenditures are forecast to continue to increase, causing concern about the sustainability of Canada’s publicly funded systems. The hospital sector accounts for over 28% of total healthcare expenditures in Canada. Although this share has fallen considerably over the past few decades, hospitals continue to represent the largest single component of healthcare expenditures. Hospital expenditures are
projected to exceed $55 billion in 2010. 

Evidence suggests that provinces differ in terms of healthcare spending efficiency, which implies that there should be an opportunity for improvement. An often-cited source of inefficiency in the Canadian hospital sector is the reliance on ‘global budgets’ as the primary source of hospital funding. Global budgets can perpetuate inefficient care because they offer little incentive to reduce costs or foster innovation.

Based on a paper commissioned by CHSRF,this brief provides a summary of the available evidence on promising hospital funding options and their impact on the following goals: timely and equitable access, optimal volume of care, quality, efficiency and constraining future cost increases.

BMJ Group and McMaster University's Health Information Research Unit are collaborating to provide you with access to current best evidence from research, tailored to your own health care interests, to support evidence-based clinical decisions.

This service is unique: all citations (from over 120 premier clinical journals) are pre-rated for quality by research staff, then rated for clinical relevance and interest by at least 3 members of a worldwide panel of practicing physicians. Here's what we offer:

• A searchable database of the best evidence from the medical literature
• An email alerting system
• Links to selected evidence-based resources

Ontario Renal Network

The National Kidney Foundation Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative (NKF KDOQI) ™ has provided evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for all stages of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and related complications since 1997. Recognized throughout the world for improving the diagnosis and treatment of kidney disease, the KDOQI Guidelines have changed the practices of numerous specialties and disciplines and improved the lives of thousands of kidney patients
  

Healthcare decision makers—including clinicians and other healthcare providers—increasingly turn to systematic reviews for reliable, evidence-based comparisons of health interventions. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies. They can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. But the quality of systematic reviews varies; often the scientific rigor of the collected literature is not scrutinized or there are errors in data extraction and meta-analysis.

We have developed a Research Toolkit that provides practical "how to" guides and tools for novice/new researchers and for those who wish to improve their research skills knowledge.

Statistics suggest that the prevalence of maladies, medical conditions and probability for medical conditions exist more intensely in rural areas, yet no noteworthy studies have been directed primarily to the sector. A group of residents and healthcare professionals in a rural Ontario community in Huron County propose to create a centre to research healthcare issues in rural populations, the first community-driven rural research centre in Canada. Most of healthcare-related research conducted in Canada and elsewhere is based on results of surveys taken of test populations close to large urban medical centres of learning or practice, with projections of results for rural sector populations.

Irrespective of the traits they study, social and behavioral scientists understand that no two people will express a given trait in exactly the same manner. Variation is the rule, and social and behavioral researchers try to uncover the reasons for those differences.

Historically, research in social and behavioral science has focused on environmental contributions to human variation, while biologists studied inherited variation in anatomy and physiology. Yet exciting newer research suggest that genes and environment participate in a complicated dynamic to influence not only health and disease, but also social and behavioral traits.

The nature/nurture debate has confounded research on social and behavioral phenotypes since the late nineteenth century. This program takes the position that the debate is unhelpful and misleading, because no gene operates outside of an environment - beginning with the environment of the cell and extending to the influences of the external world.
  

Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic

A Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic can provide ongoing care while helping promote disease prevention and healthy living. Nurse practitioners can diagnose and treat common injuries and illnesses, write some prescriptions and order blood and diagnostic tests. You can also find nurse practitioners working throughout the province in Family Health Teams and other types of clinics.

Safe care … accepting no less.

Frontline healthcare providers and healthcare organizations around the world are looking for and developing solutions to patient safety incidents and challenges.

Global Patient Safety Alerts is an innovative information-sharing resource to help you prevent and mitigate patient safety incidents in your organization and help others succeed.

Here you’ll find more than 800 patient safety incident advisories, alerts, and recommendations. Learn what works and share your own insights and solutions with healthcare providers, healthcare organizations, patients, and the public.

You’ll also find customizable, evidence-based tools you can start using immediately to help you achieve your goals.

By asking, listening, and talking to one another, we can grow our own patient safety and quality initiatives and help others grow theirs. Join the conversation and get the solutions you need today.
  

Plan ahead.

Read the requirements of the agency and draft an outline. You may have to register one month in advance.

For Internal Review:

Remember to have the grant to the grants office at least three weeks prior to the agency deadline.

Keep it focused and simple.

Your reviewer will not be as expert as you, so provide the needed background. The experiments proposed should address the hypothesis. Preliminary data that strengthen the proposal should always be included. Only propose what can reasonably be done in the granting period.

Prove that you can do it.

The budget your propose, your publication record, the collaborators that are on side and the facilities that you have to work in are all critical to prove that not only are the studies feasible but that you will actually accomplish the proposed studies.
  

A resource from the BC Environmental and Occupational Health Research Network. Learn about:

• how to search for grant funding
• getting started with small grants
• the anatomy of a grant application
• common concerns of grant reviewers
• building partnerships
• and much more!

G-I-N PUBLIC is a working group of researchers, health professionals and consumers who promote ways to inform and involve the public in clinical guideline activity around the world. G-I-N PUBLIC uses a wiki website to post information about how patients and the public can be involved in guideline development. You can find information about projects in various countries, practical information such as handbooks on public involvement and lots of literature references.

Evidence and perspectives for funding health care in Canada.

Health Care in Canada is CIHI’s annual flagship report on the health care system and the health of Canadians. Since 2000, it has been a resource that tables fundamental issues facing the health care system. Addressing questions surrounding patient safety, wait times, health care spending and analyses on how the system has adapted over time to meet changing needs has made Health Care in Canada a key source for the public and policy-makers alike.

This year’s report provides perspective on changes in the health care system and on current thinking surrounding health care and outcomes of care. As with its predecessors, Health Care in Canada 2010 draws on both internal and external information and data and introduces international comparisons where appropriate.

Fall from slips and trips are the second leading cause of injury to B.C. healthcare workers. This study, funded through WorkSafeBC's Research Secretariat, is a detailed investigation of workplace falls over a 3-year period among healthcare workers in a large B.C. health region. The study looked at the incidence of falls in acute, residential, and community care by occupation, time of year, day of the week, time of day, and location of work, as well as contributing factors.

The healthcare sector makes up roughly one-tenth of the economic activity of modern economies, and labour inputs make up a large share of its costs, relative to other industries. As a result, the measurement, tracking and improvement of labour productivity in this industry, referred to here as health human resources productivity (HHRP), should be of significant policy concern. In principle, HHRP should be defined in terms of the relationship between health outcomes achieved (health status protection or improvement for individuals or populations) and health human resource inputs (time, effort, skills and knowledge) required. However, the vast majority of HHRP literature defines HHRP as the ratio of procedural and service outputs over inputs measured in terms of numbers of personnel, or time.

Health Indicators 2011 is the 12th in a series of annual reports containing the most recently available health indicators data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information and Statistics Canada. In addition to presenting the latest indicator data, this year's report features a focus section on mental health, including five new indicators that provide information about Canada's mental health system

This course consists of a brief introduction followed by three lessons. Within these lessons there are video clips, case studies, and knowledge check questions.

Health Systems Evidence is a continuously updated repository of syntheses of research evidence about governance, financial and delivery arrangements within health systems, and about implementation strategies that can support change in health systems. Over time Health Systems Evidence will also contain a continuously updated repository of economic evaluations in these same domains, descriptions of health system reforms, and descriptions of health systems.

The foundation for any health technology assessment (HTA) is information. In fact, health technology assessment is the synthesis of many pieces of information from many different sources. The purpose of an HTA is to provide health care decision-makers with the evidence they need to make informed decisions concerning the introduction, allocation and cost-effective use of medical technologies.

Since its beginnings in the United States in the early 1970s, health technology assessment has expanded throughout the world. This growth has been accompanied by the development of many useful sources for HTA information. Some of these sources are produced by government and HTA agencies, while others are the products of centres involved in advancing evidence-based health care, such as the international Cochrane Collaboration.

The amount of information on Internet is of course overwhelming and there is the additional problem that information can be biased, out-of-date or low-quality. The key to efficient searching is to know where reliable and relevant information can most often be found.

This guide focuses on Internet sites, particularly those that may be useful for people involved in health care in Alberta, Canada, but health technology assessments will also incorporate data from other sources. These may include specialized bibliographic databases relevant to the subject of the assessment; data from government and regulatory agencies; administrative databases; industry studies, and advice from experts in the field. Traditional print resources, such as medical textbooks, may also provide background information. These sources will vary depending on the subject and scope of the assessment. People outside of Canada may wish to add sites (i.e. government, regulatory agencies, etc.) specific to their geographic context.

Canada's prized Medicare system is facing serious challenges on two key fronts: in meeting the legitimate health care needs of Canadians and in being affordable for the public purse. The founding
principles of Medicare are not being met today either in letter or in spirit. Canadians are not receiving the value they deserve from the health care system. In both 2008 and 2009, the Euro-Canada Health Consumer Index ranked Canada 30th of 30 countries (the U.S. was not included in the sample) in terms of value for money spent on health care. Canadians deserve better.

Canada cannot continue on this path. The system needs to be massively transformed, a task that
demands political courage and leadership, flexibility from within the health care professions and farsightedness on the part of the public. It is a lot to demand, but nothing less than one of Canada’s
most cherished national institutions is at stake. Unwillingness to confront the challenges is not an
 option.

About Healthline BodyMaps
BodyMaps is an interactive visual search tool that allows users to explore the human body in 3-D. With easy-to-use navigation, users can search multiple layers of the human anatomy, view systems and organs down to their smallest parts, and understand in detail how the human body works.

Using detailed 3-D models of body parts-including muscles, veins, bones, and organs-Body Maps offers a new way to visualize and manage your health. See how the coronary artery delivers blood to the heart, and learn how plaque build-up on artery walls leads to heart disease. Locate the exact location of a pulled muscle or broken bone, and find information on how to prevent injuries. View a cross-section of the human brain, and learn which areas control certain emotions and body functions.

By offering rich, detailed anatomical images alongside links to relevant and useful health information, BodyMaps allows you to leam about your body and your health in a personalized and revolutionary new way.

This website brings together people from across industries who have an interest in matters pertaining to high reliability organizations (defined as "organizations which have fewer than normal accidents"). The site features articles, examples of high reliability organizations, a Risk Mitigation Model, as well as archives from their annual conference.

Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence is the American Hospital Association's strategic platform to accelerate performance improvement and support delivery system transformation in the nation's hospitals and health systems.

HPOE provides:

• Education on best practices through multiple channels,
• Develops evidence-based tools and guides,
• Provides leadership development through fellowships and networks, and
• Engages hospitals in national improvement projects.

Working in collaboration with allied hospital associations and national partners, HPOE synthesizes and disseminates knowledge, shares proven practices, and spreads innovation to support care improvement at the local level.
  

Slide presentation regarding citing activity on Twitter among scholars.

Policy issue and context: poor work environments compromise healthworkforce
supply and quality of care 

• Health policy-makers face the challenge of matching increasing demand for

health care with a sufficient supply of health professionals in times of existing and projected health-workforce shortages.

• The work environment constitutes an important factor in the recruitment and

retention of health professionals, and the characteristics of the work environment affect the quality of care both directly and indirectly.  Addressing the work environment, therefore, plays a critical role in ensuring both the supply of a health workforce and the enhancement, effectiveness and motivation of that workforce.

• The purpose of providing attractive and supportive work environments is to

create incentives for entering – and remaining in – the health professions, and to provide conditions that enable health workers to perform effectively (to achieve high-quality health services).

Patients are most at risk for experiencing gaps in care that lead to rehospitalization during the transition between care settings. The focus of this guide is the transition of residents from the hospital to the skilled nursing facility (SNF) setting and the associated transfer of responsibility from the hospital to the SNF care team. (SNF is an umbrella term that includes nursing homes, long-term care facilities, acute rehabilitation facilities, and post-acute care facilities.)

Based on a synthesis of the literature, interviews with experts, direct observations in SNFs, and workgroups with clinicians at field sites, this How-to Guide highlights four promising changes for an ideal transition and several other changes that merit further testing. Key tools and resources to help organizations implement these changes are also included.
  

The IHI Improvement Map is an open resource, available free of charge for anyone, anywhere who share's IHI's mission of improving health care.

We have created this user-friendly, online tool to make the contents of the Improvement Map easily accessible.

You can use this tool to create your overall improvement plan, set and align priorities, and then dive deeply into the knowledge base in areas in which you've chosen to focus.

The IHI Improvement Map

The Improvement Map is a free interactive, web-based tool designed to bring together the best knowledge available on the key process improvements that lead to exceptional patient care.
  

A healthier working environment is linked to a healthier workforce. Nurses who rate their
facilities as positive environments have fewer absences due to illness, lower rates of
musculoskeletal pain, and better self-rated health.1 Research shows that organizational and
managerial support lessen nurse dissatisfaction and burnout.2 As well, a positive link has
been identified between nurses’ job satisfaction and patient outcomes. A study conducted in
Ontario teaching hospitals showed that patient satisfaction with nursing care was directly
related to how satisfied nurses were with their jobs.

This website includes information about the Indigenous Cultural Competency (ICC) Online Training Program delivered by the Provincial Health Services Authority of British Columbia.

Core ICC Training is designed to increase Aboriginal-specific knowledge, enhance individual self awareness and strengthen skills for any professional working directly or indirectly with Indigenous people. This training would be of particular interest to those working in organizations such as justice, policing, child and family services, education, business and government.

Core ICC Health Training was designed for Health Authority, Ministry of Health, and other professionals working in the health care field. It includes the foundation provided in Core ICC with an additional two modules that focus on health care issues for those working with Indigenous people in British Columbia.

We currently offer online courses in the areas of quality improvement, patient safety, and leadership.  Each course takes one to two hours to complete and consists of several lessons taking 15-30 minutes each.

In 2009, All Nations’ Healing Hospital in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, identified an opportunity to introduce a palette of electronic nursing resources through the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs), wireless infrastructure and laptop computers in order to enhance timely, at the-bedside access to current policies and procedures and resources.

Individuals from All Nations’ Healing Hospital, MITACS Accelerate and the College of Nursing,
University of Saskatchewan, formed a partnership. The partners were particularly interested
exploring the impact of the technology innovations on nurses in a rural, primarily Aboriginal
 context.

The work environment shifted from a reliance on paper-based, institutional documents to an
online format. Nursing staff used their PDAs to ensure that the information they were using for
patient care was relevant, up-to-date and applicable. All the partners benefited from working
together, and there is a commitment from the Hospital and the University of Saskatchewan’s
College of Nursing to maintain the relationship.

Case begins on Page 42 of linked casebook

This Casebook, the second in a series produced by Alberta Innovates – Health Solutions, showcases knowledge translation activities of the Interdisciplinary Team Grant program.  The program was launched in 2008 to support research addressing complex health problems. Co-funded by Alberta Health and Wellness and Alberta Innovates – Health Solutions, the program provides $50 million over fi ve years for 10 teams. The teams are interdisciplinary and multi institutional and include nearly 600 researchers and 160 trainees, and support 147 international collaborations. Research activities of the teams cover the spectrum of basic biomedical, clinical, health services, and population health
research and all encompass an integrated KT approach.

The Knowledge Translation Casebook: Sharing Stories of Evidence-Informed Practice is a culmination of many years of research capacity enhancement within Interior Health, primarily led since December 2005 by the IH Research Capacity Enhancement Team and funded by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research – Health Services and Policy Research Support Network. The team has strived to achieve sustainable research capacity within IH, translate and applying research and build/enhance research partnerships, throughout their time with IH (2005-2010). We hope that the stories contained within this casebook help inspire others within the organization to support their work – practices and decisions – with evidence, collaborate with others, and communicate the benefits of this translation in years to come.The Interior Health Knowledge Translation Casebook: Sharing Stories of Evidence-Informed Practice is the culmination of 5 years of research capacity enhancement within Interior Health and a collection of 30 examples of evidence-informed practices within the region.

In this casebook, you will learn about some very diverse and interesting KT initiatives, written in very diverse and interesting styles. This series of KT stories provides valuable insights into the real world of evidence-informed practice and knowledge translation within the Interior Health region.
  

Health-care workers face a high risk of developing injuries to their muscles, tendons or other soft-tissues, including back pain. These injuries are also known as musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs).

Activities such as lifting and handling patients are one of the main causes of MSDs in health-care workers.

Many prevention initiatives – such as using mechanical patient lifts, physical exercise programs or education programs – have been used to try to prevent MSDs from occurring in health-care workers. However, little is known about the effectiveness of these programs.

IWH conducted a systematic review to summarize the existing scientific literature on the effectiveness of MSD prevention programs for health-care workers.

The findings and recommendations from this review will be of interest to those involved in health and safety issues in health-care settings, including health-care workers, managers, policy-makers, unions researchers and others.

As a part of the "Effective Continuing Professional Development for Translating Shared Decision Making in Primary Care" project funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research we are pleased to post our inventory of programs and training activities dedicated to shared decision making. This inventory is a detailed list of international training activities from around the world, designed for all kinds of healthcare professionals. The activities teach professionals about shared decision making and help them integrate the approach into their daily practice.

A free world-class education for anyone anywhere.The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.

Watch. Practice.
Learn almost anything for free.

With a library of over 2,700 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 240 practice exercises, we're on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.

All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.
  

CIHR has identified two broad categories of knowledge translation. The first, integrated KT, is an effective way of doing research that involves collaboration between researchers and knowledge users at every stage of the research process - from shaping the research question, to interpreting the results, to disseminating the research findings into practice. This co-production of research increases the likelihood that the results of a project will be relevant to end-users, thereby improving the possibility of uptake and application.

The compilation of case studies found in this publication concerns itself with the second and equally important category of knowledge translation, end-of-grant KT. End-of-grant KT refers to the dissemination of findings generated from research once a project is completed, depending on the extent to which there are mature findings appropriate for dissemination. Researchers who undertake traditional dissemination activities such as publishing in peer-reviewed journals and presenting their research at conferences and workshops are engaging in end-of-grant knowledge translation.

This guide was developed by an interdisciplinary team of knowledge and information specialists, together with the investigators of the Knowledge Utilization and Policy Implementation (KUPI) research program. KUPI is a multi-year (2002-2007), collaboration funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Principal investigator, Dr. Carole Estabrooks, along with the rest of the KUPI team, are investigating the determinants and processes of using research knowledge in implementing policy to improve patient and system outcomes. KUPI consists of a unique team of researchers from across Canada that brings together the disciplines of nursing, organization studies, political sciences and sociology.

The Health Systems Research Centre (HSRC) in the Department of Management Science is a grouping of management scientists with a common interest in the development and application of management science/operational research methods, quantitative and qualitative, to important health systems issues. Whilst the health systems research issues tackled are wide and varied, many of them relate to the general challenges of helping health systems to make better use of available resources, in terms of both improving efficiency and improving patient experiences. Much of it concerns Knowledge Transfer, be it between researchers and practitioners, between industry and healthcare, or between the health systems of different countries.

Learning From the Best: Benchmarking Canada's Health System examines Canadians' health status, non-medical determinants of health, quality of care and access to care. It is based on international results that appear in the OECD's Health at a Glance 2011, also being released today, which provides the latest statistics and indicators for comparing health systems across 34 member countries.

The government wants to place patients’ needs, wishes and preferences at the heart of clinical decision-making, a vision articulated by the Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley, in the phrase ‘nothing about me, without me’. But what does this mean in practice?

Making shared decision-making a reality: No decision about me, without me aims to answer that question. It clarifies what is meant by the term shared decision-making and what skills and resources are required to implement it and it also outlines what action is needed to make this vision a reality.

Nursing has always been an integral part of community healthcare, and that role will grow in the future. Rising hospital and long-term care costs, medical breakthroughs and new attitudes toward care are all driving demand for improved home care, public health, primary healthcare and other community care services. This move to community health requires careful human resources planning to ensure adequate skilled staff are available to deliver services and are used to their full potential.

The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, a first-of-its-kind social media center focused on health care, builds on Mayo Clinic’s leadership among health care providers in adopting social media tools, which began with podcasting in 2005. Mayo Clinic has the most popular medical provider channel on YouTube and more than 100,000 “followers” on Twitter, as well as an active Facebook page with over 30,000 connections. With its News Blog, Podcast Blog and Sharing Mayo Clinic, a blog that enables patients and employees to tell their Mayo Clinic stories, Mayo has been a pioneer in hospital blogging. MayoClinic.com, Mayo’s consumer health information site, also hosts a dozen blogs on topics ranging from Alzheimer’s to The Mayo Clinic Diet.

Mayo has also used social media tools for internal communications, beginning in 2008 with a blog to promote employee conversations relating to the organization’s strategic plan, and including innovative use of video and a hybrid “insider” newsletter/blog. This employee engagement contributes to Mayo Clinic being recognized among Fortune magazine’s “Best Places to Work.”

The center will accelerate adoption of social media for health-related purposes, starting at Mayo and then within health care more broadly. Through this work, Mayo Clinic looks to help improve health literacy, health care delivery and population health worldwide.
  

KT+provides access to the current evidence on "T2" knowledge translation* (ie, research addressing the knowledge to practice gap), including published original articles and systematic reviews on health care quality improvement, continuing professional education, computerized clinical decision support, health services research and patient adherence. Its purpose is to inform those working in the knowledge translation area of current research as it is published.

* based on the notion that T1 KT involves translational research from the lab to humans, while T2 KT has to do with understanding and enhancing the dissemination and application of research-derived knowledge in health care (Hulley et al, 2007).

You will find two types of articles on this site:

Quality-filtered KT Articles
The best evidence relevant to knowledge translation in the areas of quality improvement, continuing medical education, computerized clinical decision support, health services research and patient adherence, identified from over 130 premier clinical journals. All citations are pre-rated for quality by research staff at McMaster University. All articles are then rated for clinical relevance and interest by at least 3 members of a worldwide panel of practicing health professionals.

Non-filtered KT Articles
Knowledge translation research articles identified from other sources (i.e., the included studies of KT systematic reviews) that are not quality filtered but have relevant KT content. These papers are not rated by the panel of health professionals.

Here's what we offer:

• A cumulative searchable bibliographic database of evidence from the health care literature
• An email alerting system

From: BC Patient Safety & Quality Council
The Measurement Strategies Report provides a summary of successful measurement systems from around the world and how these systems have been used to improve the quality of healthcare. This report was developed with input from the Measurement and Indicators Working Group.

Field of Work: Measuring the contributions of nurses to quality health care

Problem Synopsis: Nurses are the single largest group of health care providers and in close proximity to the delivery of patient care. Yet, the critical work nurses provide—especially in inpatient settings—is unseen and undervalued. One reason is that the growing evidence base that quantifies how nursing and nursing interventions affect quality of care and patient outcomes has not been well understood or disseminated.

Synopsis of the Work: In 2001, RWJF provided funding to the Washington-based National Quality Forum (NQF) for the identification and endorsement of a set of standards that would adequately quantify nurses’ contributions to higher-value inpatient care—improvements in the quality of care hospitalized patients receive and efficiencies in the way care is delivered.

Key Findings/Results: After a rigorous consensus process, in 2004, the NQF endorsed 15 national voluntary consensus standards for nursing-sensitive care—referred to as the “NQF–15”—that can be used for performance measurement and public reporting of hospital-level performance in three domains:

• Patient-centered measures, such as patient falls with injuries
• Nursing-centered measures, such as smoking-cessation counseling
• System-centered measures, such as the mix of registered nurses to licensed practical nurses and unlicensed assistive personnel

Methodspace is the home of the Research Methods community from across the world. Join us on Methodspace! If you're not a member already, why not join us - you'll find lots of groups and resources relevant to your research.

Here at MyHealthAlberta, you will find all of that great information, and much more, but from a single, reliable source relevant to Albertans.

In this technical age, we often turn to the internet when we are shopping around for information, whether it’s for the purchase of an automobile, a holiday, or even the daily weather forecast. No matter what the search is for, it almost always turns up conflicting information.

The same is true when searching the internet for health information.

The vastness of the internet is what makes it valuable, but it can also be overwhelming—too many websites, each with different descriptions, preventions, treatment recommendations, each claiming to be an expert on this condition, or that disease.
  

Welcome to the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools (NCCMT)

We are one of six National Collaborating Centres for Public Health in Canada. The NCCMT provides leadership and expertise in sharing what works in public health. Our primary target audiences are public health managers and professionals across Canada who promote and facilitate evidence-informed decision making. Our products and services are available and relevant to all public health practitioners, policy makers and researchers. We believe that using evidence to inform public health practice and policy in Canada can improve our public health system and, ultimately, the health of all Canadians. We help you to find and use innovative, high quality, up-to-date methods and tools for sharing what works in public health.

The Centre for Clinical Health Services Research and Development (CCHSRD) at NUI Galway was established in 2006 as a timely response to the research needs of a transforming Irish health service. Recent national reforms to health care provision emphasise an integrated, interdisciplinary approach. The Centre is well placed to support and reflect this new and collaborative way of working, by harnessing as it does a rich diversity of research perspectives, methodologies and expertise from a range of disciplines. The mission of the Centre for Clinical Health Services Research and Development is to conduct, report and disseminate clinical health services research, characterised by interdisciplinary and inter-agency ways of working, with a view to producing high quality information about our health and health services.

An Aboriginal Research Network to improve and enhance the health and well-being of Aboriginal Peoples.

The mission of NEARBC is to create an environment where researchers and communities collaborate to develop research capacity that is relevant to Aboriginal peoples and is competitive in national and international arenas.

Based at Westmead, staff of the Centre for Health Services Research conduct epidemiologic, health services and public health research; teach epidemiology, evidence-based medicine and public health; supervise Masters and PhD students; and provide direct support to clinicians and population health professionals and managers.  Recent projects have included a state-wide survey to underpin NHMRC guidelines on transfusion practices, a qualitative and quantitative study of day of surgery theatre cancellations, evaluations of the safety of cardiac surgery and neuroradiologic procedures and utilization of pathology tests.

The Health Improvement and Innovation Resource Centre is the web-based resource that will provide the tools, knowledge and latest information that will support the health and disability sector as it works to improve service delivery, implement innovation and increase productivity. The HIIRC is sponsored by the Ministy of Health, with the guidance of the sector to promote sector engagement identify and serve as a central repository of best practice, innovation, new evidence and learning and to make New Zealand related research more accessible to clinicians, providers and researchers.

NIOSH Science Blog

What do EHRs have to do with NIOSH? In the clinical setting, the accurate diagnosis and management of work-related conditions is essential to an individual's health. While the EHR does not replace the skilled health care provider, it can provide information to assist providers with evaluating the contribution and impact of work on health. For example, when a person's job and workplace are recorded in the EHR, this information can help the provider evaluate the source of a patient's injury or illness. Information about a person's jobs and workplaces over time can be used to assess whether or not a chronic illnesses—such as cancer—may be related to exposures at their workplaces. In its just-released report entitled Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk, What We Can Do Now, the President's Cancer Panel recommended that physicians routinely ask their patients about their previous and current work, and that this information be incorporated into the medical record. Programming the EHR to store and display information about a person's job history will facilitate this.

Northern Health's Research and Evaluation Department's list of Resources and Links, broken down by:

• Decision Support (Evidence Use) Resources
• Research Development & Support Resources
• Evaluation Resources

Job dissatisfaction among nurses contributes to costly labor disputes, turnover, and risk to patients.

Examining survey data from 95,499 nurses, researchers found much higher job dissatisfaction and burnout among nurses who were directly caring for patients in hospitals and nursing homes than among nurses working in other jobs or settings, such as the pharmaceutical industry. Strikingly, nurses are particularly dissatisfied with their health benefits, which highlights the need for a benefits review to make nurses’ benefits more comparable to those of other white-collar employees. Patient satisfaction levels are lower in hospitals with more nurses who are dissatisfied or burned out—a finding that signals problems with quality of care. Improving nurses’ working conditions may improve both nurses’ and patients’ satisfaction as well as the quality of care.
  

The NBPRU is a unique collaboration between researchers and educators at the University of Ottawa and an active grassroots professional association, the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario. The Unit strives to bring the best knowledge to nursing and healthcare to enhance practice and improve health and system outcomes.

Find articles from over 50 trusted nursing journals, including AJN and Nursing2010. Make our Recommended Reading list your first stop for the latest research. You'll also want to become a NursingCenter member. Members can save articles to My File Drawer for easy access anytime. Check back often to see the latest additions to our ever-growing collection. Most articles are available in both html and .pdf formats.

The BC Nursing Research Initiative (BCNRI) was established to build practice-relevant health services research related to the nursing workforce in British Columbia. The Nursing Research Facilitator Program funded one position within each of the six BC health authorities to build awareness of and support for the development of this research.

This evaluation of the Nursing Research Facilitator Program provides an overview of the program’s progress in its first year of implementation (January to December 2010) based on program objectives, and highlights achievements and challenges to inform the program’s evolution. The evaluation focuses on perceptions of the program and experiences reported by key stakeholder groups: nursing research facilitators; executives and managers directly responsible for the facilitator role and/or for supporting nursing research or nursing services; and participants in facilitator activities, such as nurses, practitioners, managers and academic researchers. 

The Occupational Health and Safety Agency for Healthcare (OHSAH) in British Columbia is a provincial occupational health and safety agency for the healthcare sector. Our goal is to reduce workplace injuries and illness in healthcare workers and return injured workers back to the job quickly and safely. OHSAH is jointly governed by employers and unions (bipartite), providing an innovative approach to improving workplace health and safety in the healthcare sector. A true strength of the Agency is the collaboration that occurs among these key stakeholders. We have programs and expertise in disability and disease prevention, occupational hygiene, ergonomics, occupational medicine, occupational psychology, education and training, and program evaluation. We also design, maintain, update, and provide analyses for the full range of occupational health indicators and initiatives, using the Workplace Health Indicator Tracking and Evaluation (WHITE™) Database, developed by OHSAH.

Funded primarily by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Ontario Training Centre in Health Services and Policy Research (OTC) is a consortium of six Ontario universities that offers graduate training leading to a Diploma in Health Services and Policy Research at Lakehead, Laurentian, McMaster, Ottawa, and York universities or to an equivalent qualification through the Collaborative Graduate Program in Health Services and Policy Research at the University of Toronto. The program, which is competency-based, includes the following features:  student stipends, course availability at any of the 6 participating universities; summer institutes; distance learning opportunities; linkages with students and faculty across universities and disciplines; and field placement opportunities in policy and research settings across the province.

Pass it on! is a series of stories about successful changes to the way healthcare is delivered. Each story details an initiative that was either motivated or enhanced by evidence – whether observed in a specific project or emerging from scientific literature – and has resulted in better health outcomes for patients. The profiles provide practical ideas that can be adapted and used to inspire change in organizations across Canada.

While there is increasing evidence on patient safety in acute care settings, less is known about the safety of healthcare services in the community, particularly within primary care.

In 2009, the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) partnered with the BC Patient Safety & Quality Council (BCPSQC) to commission a research report on the current state of knowledge of patient safety in primary care with the goal of identifying the key issues, priorities, opportunities and strategies for advancing patient safety in primary care in Canada. Through a competitive process, a research team from the Institute of Health Economics was commissioned to develop the report, "Patient Safety in Primary Care" (pdf-2,984Kb)

Together with a pan-Canadian Advisory Group, experts and stakeholders from across Canada and internationally were engaged to contribute information and expertise throughout the research process.
  

• Monitoring progress and evaluating results are key functions to improve the performance of those responsible for implementing health services.
• M&E show whether a service/program is accomplishing its goals. It identifies program weaknesses and strengths, areas of the program that need revision, and areas of the program that meet or exceed expectations.
    

Excerpt from 52 page slide presentation

On April 12, 2010, the Occupational Cancer Research Centre and the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) co-hosted a scientific symposium on the health effects of shift work. More than 100 researchers and representatives from the employer, labour and workers’ compensation communities — primarily from Ontario, but also other parts of Canada, the United States and Europe — came together in Toronto to participate in the symposium. The aim was to provide an overview from leading scientific experts on research findings about the health effects of shift work, and collectively identify the key gaps in the research evidence.

PHC RIS produces a variety of fact sheets on dissemination, information exchange and getting your point across.

We’ve scoured the web and talked to the experts to design fact sheets that present information simply, clearly and succinctly. Basically we’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to!

These Fact Sheets are available in PDF and are useful resources to share at workshops and conferences. Multiple copies can be ordered FREE of charge by completing our on-line order form.

Browse the collection of Fact Sheets authored by the staff of PHC RIS and select the title to view further details or the PDF icon to view the full PDF.
  

About PROSPERO

PROSPERO is an international database of prospectively registered systematic reviews in health and social care. Key features from the review protocol are recorded and maintained as a permanent record in PROSPERO. This will provide a comprehensive listing of systematic reviews registered at inception, and enable comparison of reported review findings with what was planned in the protocol.
  

With support and guidance from an expert provincial Advisory Committee, PICNet brings together health care professionals with an interest in infection control from across the continuum of care and across the province.

PubMed Health specializes in reviews of clinical effectiveness research, with easy-to-read summaries for consumers as well as full technical reports. Clinical effectiveness research finds answers to the question “What works?” in medical and health care.

PubMed Health is a service provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the world's largest medical library. It has millions of books and journals about all aspects of medicine and health care on its shelves. Its electronic services deliver trillions of bytes of data to millions of users every day.

The NLM was founded in 1836 and is part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is a division of the NLM. It creates resources for researchers, particularly large-scale research in human genetics.

The NCBI also provides public access to information through resources like PubMed. PubMed includes abstracts—short technical summaries—of more than 20 million scientific articles in medicine and health.

QHN is for anyone and everyone with an interest in improving health system performance through innovative and collaborative means. QHN's website includes a variety of tools and examples from the field in the areas of:

• Spread & sustainability
•  Leadership
•  Culture
• Quality Improvement
• Safety & Risk Management
•  Frameworks
•  Measurement
•  Integration
•  Storytelling

Examples of resources include: Spread – an emerging framework from NHS. NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement;  Spreading Good Ideas for Better Health Care: A Practical Toolkit; Managing Health Care Operations.

The availability of robust, coherent, defensible and credible data on healthcare system performance is an essential component of any effort to improve quality. Decision makers need a shared understanding of the magnitude and nature of problems facing healthcare systems, along with a basis for communication and co-operation among the many stakeholders responsible for the delivery of health services and enhancing health outcomes. In recent years, the amount of available data and information relevant to the quality of healthcare in Canada has grown – produced by national, provincial, territorial, academic, professional and patient organizations. This chartbook seeks to draw these disparate pieces of data together to build a broad and coherent picture of the quality of healthcare in Canada. The approach adopted for this Canadian chartbook builds upon that developed by the authors for similar chartbooks in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

GRIISIQ brings together the expertise of four Quebec academic nursing units focusing on nursing intervention research with clinical outcomes.

Established in 1985, the Company is a full-service research organization with in-house Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) systems, focus group facilities, and state-of-the-art data scanning and analysis software.  R.A. Malatest & Associates Ltd. has completed hundreds of research and evaluation projects for clients throughout Canada.

The Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) is the professional association representing registered nurses in Ontario. Their website is rich with resources.

As an increasingly digital society changes the nature of one-to-one relationships, this report asks whether health technology will involve patients more or exclude them even further.  In considering these issues, we present evidence that illustrates how powerful everyday technology can be in disrupting the roles and
relationships of patients and practitioners.  Sometimes the effects are positive, sometimes not. The real opportunity lies in elevating shared decision-making to be as important a concern for health technology as cost savings and efficiency. Where this is done, the digital future can offer patients far more opportunities to be involved in decisions about their care, while protecting face-to-face services for the people it has value for.

Are hospital funding mechanisms in Canada designed to provide efficient care?

Canadian governments are spending more on healthcare than ever. Driven by technological innovation, population aging, inflation and other factors, public healthcare expenditures are forecast to continue to increase, causing concern about the sustainability of Canada’s publicly funded systems. The hospital sector accounts for over 28% of total healthcare expenditures in Canada. Although this share has fallen considerably over the past few decades, hospitals continue to represent the largest single component of healthcare expenditures. Hospital expenditures are projected to exceed $55 billion in 2010.

Evidence suggests that provinces differ in terms of healthcare spending efficiency, which implies that there should be an opportunity for improvement. An often-cited source of inefficiency in the Canadian hospital sector is the reliance on ‘global budgets’ as the primary source of hospital funding. Global budgets can perpetuate inefficient care because they offer little incentive to reduce costs or foster innovation.    

The Resource for Indicator Standards (RIS) is an online catalogue of the technical documentation for health-related indicators. These indicators are used by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) or Local Health Integration Networks to monitor health care system performance. Indicators in RIS are documented in a standard way to promote appropriate use, comparison, and analysis.

The Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI) has several great resources for nurse managers!
  

The Centre for Professional Nursing Excellence is a department of RNAO that delivers programs, activities and services dedicated to the professional development of nurses and health care organizations.

Our goal is supporting nurses to provide high quality patient care through educational offerings and resources.

The RNAO Centre offers a diverse range of educational opportunities for professionals at every level of healthcare.

The guide highlights the key nursing contributions within the six steps of the end of life care pathway.

It focuses predominantly on how nurses can and do contribute to planned (and unplanned) end of life care for adults in England
  

This guide is intended for nursing home owners, administrators, nurse managers, safety and health professionals, and workers who are interested in establishing a safe resident lifting program. Research conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the Veterans’ Health Administration (VHA), and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has shown that safe resident lifting programs that incorporate mechanical lifting equipment can protect workers from injury, reduce workers’ compensation costs, and improve the quality of care delivered to residents. This guide also presents a business case to show that the investment in lifting equipment and training can be recovered through reduced workers’ compensation expenses and costs associated with lost and restricted work days.

Let Our Search Bar Help You Find What You Need

Use the search bar on the left to help you navigate through the different types of guides and research reports available. You may search by health condition, keyword, or type of research. You can add comparative effectiveness research grant awards to your search results by checking the box at the bottom of the search bar. These grants can also be viewed on the Comparative Effectiveness Research Grant Awards page.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [2009], the incidence rate of lost-workday injuries from slips, trips, and falls (STFs) on the same level in hospitals was 38.2 per 10,000 employees, which was 90% greater than the average rate for all other private industries combined (20.1 per 10,000 employees). STFs as a whole are the second most common cause of lost-workday injuries in hospitals.

Social media sites have grown in popularity among millions of people around the world. For medical professionals, these sites present new avenues for interaction with family, friends, patients, colleagues, and organizations. This article will provide an introduction to social media and the various networking opportunities they offer. With many choices and designs, these platforms provide healthcare professionals with new ways to support their work. Additionally, advice on how to get started participating in social media will be offered, and the ethical and professional concerns that have been raised about using social media will be discussed.

What Are Social Media?

Social media are Internet-based platforms that allow people to connect and interact. Mimicking the networks that exist in our personal lives, social media aim to streamline these networks and give people the opportunity to deepen connections and share with each other to a greater extent.
  

Social media is an important technological trend that has big implications for how researchers (and people in general) communicate and collaborate. Researchers have a huge amount to gain from engaging with social media in various aspects of their work.

This guide has been produced by the International Centre for Guidance Studies, and aims to provide the information needed to make an informed decision about using social media and select from the vast range of tools that are available.

One of the most important things that researchers do is to find, use and disseminate information, and social media offers a range of tools which can facilitate this. The guide discusses the use of social media for research and academic purposes and will not be examining the many other uses that social media is put to across society.

Social media can change the way in which you undertake research, and can also open up new forms of communication and dissemination. It has the power to enable researchers to engage in a wide range of dissemination in a highly efficient way.
  

The Statistical Consulting and Research Laboratory (SCARL) is operated by the UBC Department of Statistics. SCARL's services are available to all faculties as well as to off-campus clients. The services SCARL provides cover the spectrum of statistical design and analysis, as well as ancillary areas.

Unless governments change their approach to addressing the needs of poorer and socially disadvantaged Canadians, we are destined to continue to spend large amount of dollars on our health care system. Governments must expand their approach to health promotion in order to tackle the major societal factors that lead to poor health and to take pressure off health care budgets.

The report Stepping It Up: Moving the Focus from Health Care in Canada to a Healthier Canada indicates that health disparities play a significant role in health system costs. It states that ongoing spending on acute care and programs encouraging a healthy lifestyle is not enough to improve the overall health of Canadians, particularly those who live in or close to poverty.

New Charting Nursing's Future brief focuses on implementing the IOM Future of Nursing report's recommendations on interprofessional collaboration.

Among the many recommendations from last year’s groundbreaking Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, was a call for a transformed health care system in which “interprofessional collaboration and coordination are the norm.” The latest policy brief in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF’s) Charting Nursing’s Future (CNF) series is the second of four focused on the IOM report’s recommendations. It delves into what that recommendation means for health care systems, offers case studies of several collaborative care models already in place, and examines the implications for how we train nurses and other health care professionals.

Collaboration can help you better align resources with needs, reduce competition, increase effectiveness, and make your results more sustainable. Of course, achieving true and productive collaboration can also be challenging. It requires that organizations work outside historical boundaries; dedicate people, skills, and energy to the effort; deal with a diversity of priorities and culture; and think of their organizational plans and operations as part of a system that needs to function seamlessly and harmoniously. It is no wonder that many organizations are at a loss when deciding whether, when, how, and with whom to collaborate.

Institute of Health Economics

The Database of Online Health Statistics provides quick and easy access to freely available web-based statistics generated by national and global agencies and research groups.

 CPSI Research Competitions > 2008 > Research Results: Forster

The Full report is comprised of the Main Messages, the Executive Summary and the Technical Report

Deliverables
The Effects of Hospital-Acquired Clostridium Difficile Infection on In-Hospital Mortality (Article)
The effect of hospital-acquired infection with Clostridium difficile on length of stay in hospital
Team
 Lead

Alan J. Forster, MD, FRCPC, MSc.
Scientist, Clinical Epidemiology Program
Ottawa Health Research Institute
aforster@ohri.ca

Team Member(s)

Dr. Virginia Roth, The Ottawa Hospital, Ontario
Dr. Carl van Walraven, Ottawa Health Research Institute, Ontario
Dr. Kumanan Wilson, Ottawa Health Research Institute, Ontario
Dr. Monica Taljaard, Ottawa Health Research Institute, Ontario

This project was made possible through the cash and in-kind contributions of the:

Canadian Patient Safety Institute
The Ottawa Hospital
  

The National Health Service (NHS) needs to save £15 billion to £20 billion over the next few years. This paper argues that these savings could be achieved through radical patient–centred service redesign and more effective approaches to public behaviour change. However, these approaches are difficult to develop within the existing health service. NESTA’s experience of working with leading companies and developing projects in healthcare demonstrates that radical new ways of innovating that give genuine power to frontline staff, patients and the public are necessary to make these approaches widespread. This would unlock the savings we need and improve the nation’s health.

Theory is an important component of robust nursing informatics knowledge, a fact that is sometimes overlooked in both education and practice. The novice to expert model was featured in my editorial in our last issue, Volume 5, Number 4. A theory focus continues in this issue with a look at the oldest, simplest, yet robust and applicable change management theory, Kurt Lewin’s Change Theory.

TIGER:  Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform

TIGER is now moving forward to integrate a full set of recommendations on:

• Developing a U.S. nursing workforce capable of using electronic health records to improve the delivery of healthcare
• Engaging clinicians in the development of a Nationwide Health Information Technology infrastructure
• Accelerating adoption of smart, standards-based, interoperable, patient-centered technology that will make healthcare delivery safer, more efficient, timely, accessible, and efficient in a new interdisciplinary approach

Information that should be helpful as you prepare future applications to CIHR.

Hertencia Bowe, the national health information management program coordinator for Rasmussen College, spoke to Healthcare IT News about some smartphone apps that can help students and professionals be "more knowledgeable, prepared and organized when they're on the job."

Bowe says students and professionals that are pursuing a HIT degree can expect "a career of analyzing medical data, medical billing and coding and health information management," which she says means they must "be able to juggle numerous responsibilities."

This knowledge synthesis has been compiled on behalf of the planning committee for a Think Tank entitled “Toward a National Report Card for Nursing.” The objectives of the Think Tank  are to create a shared vision and critical path for a national report card on nursing, to generate support for the work, and to outline the steps to achieve the national report card. The report card for nursing is envisioned as a selected minimum set of data on input, process and output indicators that can be collected nationally (initially using pilot sites) and benchmarked. In the future, such report card data will be used to formulate relationships between the levels of indicators, and will consequently reveal the contribution of nursing care to nursing sensitive outcomes and influence policy direction for nursing.
  

The purpose of this paper is to articulate the shifts in the theoretical conceptualization of, and the practice of leadership in health care in Canada that are happening as a response to challenges of system transformation; and the implications of those shifts for individual leaders, for health services delivery, for research into health system leadership, and for leadership development approaches in university and health agencies.

The purpose of this white paper is to examine promising opportunities for innovation in Canada’s health care system. This report examines opportunities to improve the system’s sustainability in the midst of an immense and burgeoning market for healthcare products, systems and solutions. This report aims to de-compartmentalize many of the policy and programmatic tools and elements of the Canadian health landscape while demonstrating how unification of efforts across health stakeholder communities can transform Canada’s health care system into an entity that achieves productivity, innovation and sustainability.

Social media has moved beyond being a tool for young individuals to share their private lives (pictures, messages) to fostering serious discussion on technology and business.  Increasingly driven by regulatory pressures, the need “get it right the first time” and minimize costs remains a concern in the healthcare industry.  Customer feedback to improve business has thus become very important. User generated content in the form of peer reviews on service/ products often paves the way for businesses to understand any unique requirements as well as pain points of the existing services they provide. 

Social media is making interactions between end users and service providers possible by providing relatively simple, easy to access (one can access social media even using a mobile phone) and unbiased platforms for sharing feedback. Little wonder then that many healthcare providers in the world are on social media such as Twitter, Facebook,YouTube and blogs.

The TRIP Database is a clinical search engine designed to allow clinicians to quickly find answers to their clinical questions using the best available evidence.

The TRIP Database started in 1997 as a result of the work of the founders (Jon Brassey and Dr Chris Price) in answering clinical questions. They recognised that searching multiple websites separately for relevant information was time-consuming. The creation of the TRIP Database allowed the simultaneous searching of multiple sites, hence speeding up the question answering process.

The evolution of the TRIP Database has been guided by the desire to answer real clinical questions using the principles of evidence based medicine. TRIP Database Ltd’s involvement in clinical question answering has shown the type of material that is useful in answering genuine questions health professionals have. In 2006 the site was been externally evaluated by a team from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (www.cebm.net) led by Professor Paul Glasziou. More recently we have created a TRIP Advisory which has given us further input into the development of the site.

UBC Centre for Health Services & Policy Research (CHSPR) is committed to making lasting advances to population health and health services in Canada as leaders of independent, policy relevant research, graduate training, and data resources.

The Health Services Research Network (HSRN) aims to connect all universities, commercial and professional organisations, charities and NHS bodies with an interest in HSR.

The Centre for Health Services Research and Policy (CHSRP) is a multi-disciplinary research centre within the School of Population Health, University of Auckland. CHSRP undertakes research with a primary focus on the funding, provision, evaluation, organisation and management of health services; and the development and implementation of health policy.

The Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS) is an international centre of excellence for health service research and research training.  The centre has a wide range of research and inter-disciplinary experience.  It undertakes commissioned research and has a portfolio of competitively funded studies.  CHSS has specialist groups for its research and other collaborations.  It is a research unit of the University School of Sociology, Social Research and Social Policy (SSPSSR)

The Centre for Health Services Research was established in 1996 to:

• oversee initial construction of the unique health datasets which are the Western Australian Data Linkage System (WA DLS), one of only six such record linkage systems worldwide
• undertake a core research program of population-based epidemiological studies into health system utilisation and outcomes
• facilitate collaboration between public health and clinical researchers, health care planners and health service administrators.

Part 2 - Exploring Two Case Examples and Imagining the Future

In the fall of 2009, the Health Strategy Innovation Cell’s CEO Neil Seeman and his Chief Imagineer
Carlos Rizo brought us a unique proposition to explore the potential of social media as a tool to advance a more responsive, patient-centred healthcare system in Ontario. Social media refers to collaborative and interactive online communication and community-building tools.  Though neophytes in social media, we recognized that the core question fit well with The Change Foundation’s work: supporting the creation of a more integrated and innovative healthcare system responsive to the needs and lived realities of those it serves.

The project had two phases, producing a two-part guide to current practice and future promise, and culminating in an online eToolkit that will be hosted by the Innovation Cell. The guide, provided for people who prefer to get information from a more traditional format, mirrors much of the content of  the eToolkit, though there will be additional dynamic and interactive resources available in the online version. We encourage you to explore the eToolkit at innovationcell.com when it is released later in June.

Twitter is a form of free micro-blogging which allows users to send and receive short public
messages called tweets. Tweets are limited to no more than 140 characters, and can include
links to blogs, web pages, images, videos and all other material online. You can start tweeting in
10 minutes, anytime, from your computer, smart phone or tablet.

By following other people and sources you are able to build up an instant, personalized
Twitter feed that meets your full range of interests, both academic and personal. Thousands of
academics and researchers at all levels of experience and across all disciplines already use
Twitter daily, alongside more than 200 million other users.

Yet how can such a brief medium have any relevance to universities and academia, where
journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can
anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

This guide answers these questions, showing you how to get started on Twitter and showing you
how Twitter can be used as a resource for research, teaching and impact activities.

Verita Strategy Group is a Canadian (FIPPA/FOIPOP compliant) company that specializes in customized analytic and technical support services in:

• research design, evaluation, analysis and reporting
• online surveys and other data-gathering sites and instruments
• database management and reporting systems
• project administration and management
• professional assessment + certification design and management
• examination design, validation and online delivery
• EDC (Electronic Data Capture) systems
• OMR data collection and scanning
• 360/MSF assessments

Custom Web-Based Surveys, EDC Systems and Analysis

We can help you from the design phase right through respondent contact and tracking and finally by compiling your data and delivering your results in a customized report. Our survey and data hosting services and our servers comply with the highest levels of data security and performance standards, including FOIPOP/FIPA requirements.
  

Funding Research and Applications

Services in this area include assistance in the preparation of grant applications by preparing cost and timeline estimates, and in the technical aspects of research ethics board (REB) submissions.

Consultation and Specialized Services

We offer a full range of services, from the highly technical to the broadly interpretive including:

• Database Design/Management
• Conversion of “Paper and Pencil” studies to online tools or OMR
• Descriptive Report Writing
• Focus Groups
• Assistance with Research and Evaluation Techniques
• Ad-Hoc Research Consultation
    

The WCIHC is in a unique position to leverage knowledge and resources for achieving system-wide change. Current findings in the field of interprofessional practice & education will be delivered to national and provincial policy makers to develop sustainable workforce strategies and high quality care.

The Western Regional Training Centre for Health Services Research (WRTC) is an innovative and collaborative initiative that supports the training of applied health services researchers across disciplines, sectors, and institutions, equipping them to address the research needs of a wide range of health care policy and decision-makers.

At a time when the world is facing a shortage of health workers, policymakers are looking for innovative strategies that can help them develop policy and programmes to bolster the global health workforce.

The Framework for Action on Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice highlights the current status of interprofessional collaboration around the world, identifies the mechanisms that shape successful collaborative teamwork and outlines a series of action items that policy-makers can apply within their local health system.

The goal of the Framework is to provide strategies and ideas that will help health policy-makers implement the elements of interprofessional education and collaborative practice that will be most beneficial in their own jurisdiction.
  

Information overload is a problem of the modern age. So, as a research communicator, how can you cut through the barrage of info and not only reach your target audience, but also engage with them?

It’s a challenge for any organization, but it’s a significant struggle for those in research communications, specifically. You’re trying to spread the word about your institution’s research endeavours, and in turn how fantastic and forward-thinking your university is, but the fight to be heard is a formidable one. Plus, you must walk the line between informing and overwhelming your audience with details about research studies. Oh, and you must maintain consistent messaging and regular contact with your audience when your research magazine is only published, say, two or three times a year.