Grant: Team Grant: Community-Based Primary Healthcare - LOI

Community based health care is the first and most frequent point of contact with the healthcare system for patients during and after a diagnosis of cancer. Timely coordinated care and communication between the patients primary care provider and oncologists is vital to improve care, but is often difficult to achieve. This program of research will study how to improve coordination of care between the patients primary care team and their cancer specialist team through a shared care model. We will study patients with breast cancer as well as those with other cancers. We will study patients who are most vulnerable, the elderly, people living in northern, rural and remote areas, low income Canadians, and recent immigrants to Canada. In order to achieve this we have assembled an interdisciplinary team of experienced researchers, community based primary healthcare clinicians, and knowledge users in five Canadian provinces who will share research methods and approaches with international researchers from Australia, Denmark and the United States. This program of research is expected to improve care for cancer patients along the continuum of cancer care. Outcomes from this program will result in tested strategies useful to healthcare policy makers to direct system change; demonstrated ability to use administrative health databases to measure and monitor system change, strategies for shared care that can be used for cancer patients and can also be generalizable to other chronic diseases managed in primary healthcare settings.