Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

This CIHR Travel Grant will help support my attendance at the annual North American Primary Care Research (NAPCRG) conference in New Orleans, Louisiana in December 2012. The NAPCRG conference is the leading international conference on primary care research. I will present, for the first time, the findings from my research entitled: Significant differences in quality of care exist based on income: results from an international survey of sicker adults in 11 OECD countries. We analyzed data from the 2011 Commonwealth Fund Survey of sicker adults that includes information on patient socio-demographic profile, health status and indicators of health care system performance. No study, to our knowledge, has provided a national picture of the state of equity in primary care services across the different dimensions of primary care in Canada and internationally. We found interesting patterns of inequities in primary care, with significant inequities identified in Canada and no country demonstrating high levels of equity across all dimensions. With these results we then considered how the national healthcare structure could explain the equitable delivery of primary care.