Blogs

Our profession, like most other professions, has been trained to take things apart to understand the whole. While this works fine in the mechanical world, it has failed us largely in the living world. Butland B, Jebb S, Kopelman P, McPherson K, Thomas S, Mardell J, et al. Foresight. Tackling obesities: future choices—Project report [1]. (Open Government Licence v3.0)) How much research has been published to “ solve the obesity epidemic ” that has had no appreciable impact? Has this fact altered researchers’ enthusiasm for deeper research into their particular interest part, or has it shifted policy and funding bodies’ support of research towards ...

COAST 2 COAST is a monthly blog that highlights the latest news from each of the Primary and Integrated Healthcare Innovation (PIHCI) Networks from across Canada. The BC Primary Health Care Research Network has made available a report by Sabrina Wong and the TRANSFORMATION Team on the first application of a refined patient-experience survey tool to compare primary healthcare performance [ BCPHCRN ] Read the latest issue of the Alberta SPOR PIHCIN ‘Communiqué’ [ Alberta SPOR ] Learn about the priorities of the Saskatchewan PIHCI Network [ Sask PIHCIN ] Carolyn Shimmin has created a useful presentation on patient engagement in health ...

Test

Recently, I hosted a medical student in my family medicine clinic in downtown Toronto. She had heard me speak about the social determinants of health (SDoH), and wanted to see how I put these ideas into practice. As we reviewed the patients we'd see that day, we talked about how poverty, precarious employment and poor housing conditions "get under our skin" [ http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.012809.103538 ] and impact health outcomes. We had a busy afternoon and saw many people dealing with complex social issues that affected their health. This included a man in his mid 20s who is homeless, making it challenging for him to stay ...

There are well-documented deficiencies in healthcare quality in the U.S. Health systems and health plans around the country invest millions of dollars in quality improvement efforts to address these deficiencies. Despite this concerted effort, broad quality improvement initiatives have failed to address persistent racial and ethnic disparities in health care. New paradigms of quality improvement, which emphasize measuring and reducing healthcare disparities are critical in addressing this problem. A large health system recently implemented a new colorectal cancer screening program. Built on a large body of high quality evidence from published literature, ...

"Henry", 48 years old. I met him in January, he was homeless, struggling with alcohol use and serious mental illness. Over the course of 4 months we advocated for Henry and found him housing. Not "shelter", housing. Its now August and Henry is recovering from his alcohol use and on his way to find employment. Henry is happy. This is one example of the narrative our system strives to tell- the story I want to tell. Unfortunately in my experience so far I've learned that Henry is not the norm and this is not the story our system allows. I charged into July ambitious as a first year resident to make an 'impact' working with the homeless in Toronto, Canada's ...