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

Health care in Canada's North faces many challenges due to geographic isolation, harsh climate, and inadequate staffing. Despite spending a lot more on a per person basis than the rest of Canada, there is still a large gap in the health of the people of the North compared to other Canadians, and within the North, between Aboriginal and non-aboriginal residents. Our proposed Circumpolar Health System Innovation Team brings together an international team of researchers, health professionals, managers, and policy makers to try to design, implement and evaluate strategies to improve access to primary health care. There are three major components: (1) to explore what policies exist and compare how health systems in circumpolar regions are performing; (2)to develop innovations that improve health care at different point of the patients' pathway: before they reache care, while they are receiving care, and afterwards when they may be needed to bereferred out of the community for further care; (3) to increase the capacity for health care research based in the North. The suite of projects within our research program will provide health care agencies the evidence and tools to improve the level of health and patient satisfaction while reducing costs