Grant: Project Grant

Rheumatic diseases affect the lives of people with these conditions, which includes their quality of life, their ability to work and the amount of health care they need to help fight these diseases. Enabling people with rheumatic diseases to spend time with nurses can help them work out how to use their medications, manage their life to overcome the disease, and improve their well-being. In British Columbia (BC), the Ministry of Health is trying to find ways to enable nurses to care for people with the most complex types of rheumatic diseases. One scheme has been to allow rheumatologists to bill for nurse consultations. Since this scheme was introduced in 2012, over 30,000 nurse consultations have been used at a cost of $6.5m. It is important to know whether spending this money in this way is improving outcomes for patients; if it is working it could be expanded, if not it could be changed. This project uses anonymous information, collected routinely, to see if there is a link between the introduction of this nurse management scheme and improvement of important outcomes. The outcomes we will be able to look at will be the number of people with these diseases that rheumatologists can see, how well they are able to continue with their treatments, whether quality of care has improved, if preventable problems are being avoided, and whether costly events like visits to hospital can be prevented. Because this information is summarizing the real-life experience of people with these diseases in BC it will be highly relevant to informing practice in the province as well as across Canada. The project includes the perspective of patients, rheumatologists, nurses, and the Ministry of Health to ensure we are able to understand the needs and represent the interests of all these groups.