Objectives and Priority Areas – Community-Based Primary Healthcare

CIHR and its partners recognize that innovative research in Community-Based Primary Healthcare (CBPHC) is essential to achieve improved equity of access, reduced wait times, care services tailored to patients and populations, better health outcomes, and other system-wide benefits.

The objectives of the CBPHC Initiative are to:

• develop and compare innovative models for CBPHC across jurisdictions within Canada (i.e., multiple provinces and/or territories, provincial/territorial and federal) and/or internationally that target the:

  prevention and management of chronic diseases

  People at risk of developing chronic disease(s) or those living with chronic conditions– especially with co-morbidities – are relatively heavy users of health services, but face significant challenges accessing coordinated, comprehensive, appropriate, and patient/individual-centred and family-centred CBPHC.

  There is consensus that innovative CBPHC delivery models are needed to improve chronic disease prevention, treatment and management, health and health equity outcomes, for individuals, patients, families, communities and populations.

  The Initiative will fund research to develop and evaluate innovative models for preventing, managing and treating individuals, families and populations at risk of developing or living with chronic disease(s) in CBPHC settings and the impacts of these models on outcome measures (e.g. access, efficiency, safety/quality, health outcomes, and equity) at the individual, provider, organization, system, and population-level.

  reduction of inequities in access to CBPHC and health outcomes in vulnerable populations

  Even with Canada's comprehensive and universal population-based insurance coverage for healthcare, subgroups in the population experience conditions of vulnerability that exacerbate inequities in accessing appropriate CBPHC.

  Canadian researchers have been at the forefront of scientific investigation that has improved our understanding of the social, cultural, economic and environmental determinants of health and how these lead to conditions of vulnerability and ultimately inequities in health outcomes. As these fields of science progress, research is needed to develop and test innovative and existing promising models of CBPHC delivery that integrate population health approaches to improve equity of access and address conditions of vulnerability.

  The Initiative will fund research to develop and evaluate innovative models to improve equity of access to appropriate CBPHC by focusing on vulnerable subgroups (defined by age, socio-economic status, developmental/functional, disability, an inability to communicate effectively, racial/ethnic background, geography, gender/sex or sexuality), who are at greater risk of poorer health outcomes and experiencing challenges in equity of access to CBPHC, and by addressing individual, social and structural determinants of health that lead to or reinforce conditions of vulnerability (e.g., stigmatization, migration).

• identify the conditions and strategies that would be necessary for scaling-up innovative models of CBPHC if they are successful;
• build inter-disciplinary and inter-professional capacity for the generation, synthesis and application of CBPHC research including training and mentoring of new CBPHC trainees, investigators and health professional scientists;
• evaluate and improve the impact of Team innovations for CBPHC by reporting on a common set of outcome measures and collaborating to form the Patient-Oriented Community-Based Primary Healthcare Network; and
• improve the competitiveness of CBPHC investigators by increasing the quantity and quality of funded applications and publications.