Happenings / L'Événement : Focus on Health-Care Settings: The Home Care Evaluation and Research Centre

Abstract

Health system restructuring in Canada has involved a dramatic shift towards the delivery of ambulatory, home-based, and, more recently, Internet-based health care. This dispersion of health-care services represents one of the most significant social changes of the last two decades and will continue to have major repercussions in the new century. Although restructuring has been rapid and ubiquitous, systematic economic evaluations of non-traditional health-care services and delivery settings have been lacking in Canada. This absence of evidence limits opportunities to measure effectiveness and impedes decision-making. To fill this gap, the Home Care Evaluation and Research Centre (HCERC) was launched in 1998 at the University of Toronto, with public and private sector funding of more than $1.2 million. HCERC's Co-Directors are Patricia McKeever (Faculty of Nursing) and Peter Coyte (Department of Health Administration, Faculty of Medicine). HCERC's goals are to facilitate collaborative research related to the settings where health care is sought, delivered, and received, and to support knowledge transfer and linkage activities throughout the research process.