Lessons Learned

Government leadership has an important role to play in creating health care structures that can overcome challenges and increase enablers to public health and primary care collaboration. These can include creating or enhancing existing collaborations as follows:

• Linked provincial databases, information technology systems, and access to surveillance data and databases;
• Practice guidelines to support collaborative inter-branch/divisional/departmental committees;
• Provincial initiatives that require or at least encourage collaboration between sectors;
• Models of service delivery that facilitate and support collaboration;
• Shared public health-primary care portfolios;
• A spirit of optimism that collaboration between public health and primary care is possible.