Ontario has both a health system and a research system that are increasingly aiming to support rapid learning and improvement. Yet, Ontario's health system still faces complex challenges, such as reducing emergency-room wait times, ending hallway medicine, improving support for people with mental health ...
Nurses have a long tradition of informally working in
expanded roles in rural and remote communities in
Canada (e.g., outpost nurses).(1; 2) The formalization of
the nurse practitioner role in Canada began in the mid1960s as a response to four interrelated factors: 1)
introduction of publicly funded heal...
Ontario has both a health system and a research system that
are increasingly putting patients and rapid learning and
improvement at their centre. For the health system, a recent
notable example of such efforts was the Patients First Act
2016 which, among other things, mandated the creation of
Patient and...
We identified a total of 21 relevant documents by
searching Health Systems Evidence and running
targeted searches in PubMed, with the search strategy
for these databases detailed in Box 2. A document was
included when it directly addressed the question posed
for this rapid synthesis (i.e., it was specifi...
Healthcare provider remuneration mechanisms are one
of the key policy levers that decision-makers can harness
to influence health-system performance.(1) In Canada,
remunerating physicians is the second-largest source of
public expenditures accounting for 21% of all health
spending in the country.(2) With...
Since the completion of the Human Genome Project
in the 1990s, there have been rapid advances of
research in the area of genetics and genomics.(1)
When combined with evolving medical technologies
this has meant that the use of genetic testing and
screening are increasingly common in the health
system. Ge...
As noted by the Health Council of Canada in 2013, there
are many definitions of quality in healthcare, but a
common conception of it is “the degree to which health
services for individuals and populations increase the
likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent
with current professional kn...
Systematic reviews are important for decision makers. They offer many potential benefits but are
often written in technical language, are too long, and do not contain contextual details which make them hard to
use for decision-making. There are many organizations that develop and disseminate derivative p...
A gap exists in efforts to support the use of research
evidence between ‘self-serve’ approaches such as ‘one-stop
shops’ for research evidence (e.g., Health Systems
Evidence – www.healthsystemsevidence.org) and ‘fullserve’ approaches such as convening stakeholder dialogues
with health-syste...
