QC, PE, NS, ON, BC, NL, NB, MB, NS: Jeannie Haggerty, Marilyn Barrett, Shannon M Berg, Anne Junker, Denis Roy, Cheryl Tschupruk, Yves Couturier, Leanne Currie, Russell Dawe, Shelly Doucet, William Montelpare, Catherine Scott, Tara Stewart, Jason Sutherland, Robin Urquhart

Please describe your research project and how it contributes to improving primary care.

Children, youth, and older adults with serious chronic conditions and limited or diminishing independence often need their primary care providers to connect them to social services, public health services, and community supports. Failure to connect to needed services leads to negative experiences for patients, caregivers and health professionals alike; it also leads to poor health outcomes and health system inefficiencies. The goal of this work was to help future development of models of care that connect smoothly across health, social and community services.

In each province we studied the policies and governing structures that restrict or allow connections. Then we identified examples of successful and unsuccessful programs that were designed to connect services in order to learn from best practices and failures. Data collection and coding of transcripts are now complete.

The primary manuscript is being drafted.