Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Intensive care requires multidisciplinary teams that diagnose and provide care of patients with life-threatening conditions requiring sophisticated organ support and monitoring such as ventilator support, blood transfusions or dialysis when kidneys fail. Patients needing critical care range from those with life threatening complications of medical illnesses to those precipitated to the Intensive Care Units (ICU) following surgery, trauma, cancer, neurological diseases or psychiatric illnesses. The care provided to critically ill is efficient, although we wish it would be perfect; the lives of about 75 percent of the patients admitted in the ICU in Canada are saved. Every Canadian admitted to the ICU, as for any other hospital service, deserves the highest standard quality of care available. Because of its complexity, its enormous human and financial cost, we must be able to show that the care we provide to critically ill patients focuses on patient and family needs and that the interventions are safe, effective, timely, efficient, and equitable. We propose to develop a National Strategy for Quality of Care Research and Evaluation to better guide healthcare providers and decision makers regarding quality of care improvement initiatives and to provide the necessary tools to facilitate the conduct of research and ways to ensure findings are translated rapidly into better care. To achieve this we plan a one-day meeting October 24 2015 where we will bring together researchers, ICU clinicians and health professionals, patients and families as well as representatives from health care organizations and governments. The overall objective of the meeting is to define national goals and long term achievable targets for improvements and outline the key elements to be included in the strategy forward.