Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Access to high quality health care has been a long-standing concern to Canadians. There are more than 12 million visits to Emergency Departments (EDs) each year in Canada and great concern exist about not only the access to, but also the quality of ED care, the long ED waiting times, and poor patient satisfaction. Improving the quality of care in EDs is important to Canadians and a necessary first step toward improving quality is to define how best to measure it. There is evidence that monitoring and reporting the quality and safety measures can have a significant impact on improving health care delivery. The objective of this project is to develop and test a set of indicators that can be used to measure the quality and safety of adult, as well as pediatric patient emergency care in Canadian EDs. These measures will be defined through a systematic process that will produce a parsimonious, yet comprehensive set of relevant, scientifically sound, and feasible indicators. The indicators will be refined and prioritized for use across Canada.