Health and social services organisation

Research Report on the Quebec Study Carried out Under the Pan-Canadian Project : Continuous Enhancement of Quality Measurement in Primary Mental Health Care: Closing the Implementation Loop (CEQM)

This research report describes the contributions of the Quebec team to the project entitled "Continuous Enhancement of Quality Measurement in Primary Mental Health Care : Closing the Implementation Loop". The main aim of this project is to support efforts at improving the quality of primary mental health care. The identification of a small set of quality measures achieving consensus was the mean retained to habilitate stakeholders to better document their practices on crucial aspects for the quality of health care services. The intervention practices targeted were directly clinical and organizational.

The project’s contributions can be broken down into two components: activities to support the pan-Canadian project; and, in Quebec – more specifically in the provincial capital region-the research project endeavored to generate awareness among stakeholders about the need to improve the quality of primary mental health care and services.

The first two sections of the rep…

The Population's Experience of Care : Portrait of Intra-regional Variations In Montréal and Montérégie

Based on the indicators described, the report suggests that:

  • A large majority of the population (86.6%) had had contacts with the health system in the two years preceding the study. While 15% of individuals reported being hospitalised and 31% going to an emergency department, 51% of individuals said they visited primary care organisations only.
  • In the six months preceding the survey, 18% of interviewees reported that some of their perceived need for health care were not met, that is, they felt they needed to see a physician but did not seen one. The proportion of unmet health care needs varied from one CSSS territory to another. We observe a decreasing gradient from relatively high proportions of unmet needs in central Montréal (24.3% at CSSS de Jeanne-Mance) to decreasing proportions of unmet needs as we move towards more rural CSSS territories and smaller regional towns in Montérégie. Indeed, the proportion of unmet needs for the CSSS de la Pommeraie and C…

Hospital emergency departments: Substitutes for primary care? Results of a survey of the population of Montréal and Montérégie

Hospital emergency departments play a central role in the health care system. They have become the main entry point for hospitalised patients and the resource of choice when primary care services are not available. As a result, emergency department utilisation is a good barometer of how the health system is working. However, the dominant portrait of emergency department utilisation has been constructed from administrative or clinical patient data. Less common are studies that document emergency services utilisation based on survey data. Yet, the latter are unique sources of information on morbidity experienced and on utilisation behaviours of the general population.

The data presented in this thematic report are from a survey of the primary care experiences of individuals in Montréal and Montérégie. The survey is part of a larger study whose aim is to better understand the organisation models of primary care services in Québec and their influence on accessibility and continu…

Interval cancer in women following a normal initial mammogram in the Québec Breast Cancer Screening Program in 1998-2000

Interval cancers are cancers that are diagnosed during the interval between a negative screen and the subsequent screen. The rate of interval cancers is a performance indicator in the terms of reference of the Quebec Breast Cancer Screening Program (PQDCS). The PQDCS terms of reference do not set a standard for interval cancer rates, but the Evaluation Indicators Working Group, which monitors breast cancer screening programs in Canada, has determined that the rate of interval cancers should not exceed 6 cases of invasive cancer per 10,000 person-years within 12 months of a negative screen, or 12 cases per 10,000 person-years within 24 months of a negative screen.

The primary objective of this analysis was to estimate the rate of interval cancers among women who received an initial mammography in the PQDCS in 1998-2000 and whose mammogram was interpreted as normal (including non-equivocal benign lesions). The analysis also sought to identify the characteristics of women,…

Équipe d'évaluation du PQDCS

North American Conference on deafness screening and intervention in early childhood - Abstracts and PowerPoints

Here are the abstracts and PowerPoints of the North American Conference on deafness screening and intervention in early childhood (January 23-25, 2003).

Disseminating Practice Guidelines to Physicians

The overall objective was to provide insight into clinical practice guidelines, their development and their implementation. The main focus was the conduction of a thorough literature review of all issues related to dissemination of clinical practice guidelines to physicians, and their eventual use. We offer that the reflections provided herein have done justice to the tasks originally defined. What follows is a summary of the salient points.

An enormous amount of attention has been devoted to clinical guidelines in the past ten years. Clinical guidelines have been defined as “systematically developed statements to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances.” Their successful implementation should improve quality of care by decreasing inappropriate variation and expediting the application of effective advances to everyday practice. Guideline development in general has accelerated markedly since the mid-1980s. Th…