Health systems across BC are facing significant pressures related to health human resources, including workforce shortages, provider burnout, fragmented care delivery, and increasing patient complexity. Community health centres play an important role in supporting integrated, team-based care for marginalized and underserved communities, yet many providers and organizations continue to work within siloed structures that limit collaboration across disciplines and sectors. Shared care is already practiced in some community-based settings to address these health human resource challenges.The gap: we do not have a clear understanding of how health care providers working in complex settings practice shared care, how it works and in what contexts.
Description of activities: the engagement process will take place over four months and bring together PWLE, health care providers, community health care workers (CHWs) and researchers to engage in three interrelated activities. Pre planning activities will be prepared by the trainee, principal applicant and research user co-lead. The first activity will be an online meeting to foster good working relations by getting to know each other, clarifying roles and gaining perspectives on discussion questions to guide our activities.
The second activity will be a half-day in-person engagement and mapping session hosted at REACH Community Health Centre using Drawing Change, a visual facilitation organization. This session will bring participants together to identify priorities, share experiences and perspectives and map how shared care works. The mapping session will be graphically recorded by the Drawing Change facilitator. The third activity will be a virtual meeting to reflect and debrief our process, discuss key learnings and explore potential future collaborations or funding opportunities, e.g., Mobilize Award.
Anticipated outcomes of activities: (1) strengthened relationships between researchers and research users; (2) co-develop a shared understanding of key challenges and opportunities related to shared care; (3) identification of future research and engagement priorities; (4) co-develop a conceptual mapping of how shared care works and (5) co-develop a foundation for future work focused on evidence-informed shared care models, workforce sustainability and integrated care innovation in BC.
Additional team members and participating organizations:
Other collaborators include Daisy kler – manager, Multicultural Family Centre and Health Equity and Engagement Department (HEED).