Evidence-based Content
Evidence-based support for the content of this toolkit
Leads and co-investigators on a large multi-jurisdictional, multidisciplinary program of research entitled Strengthening Primary Health Care through Primary Care and Public Health Collaboration are the authors of this toolkit.
The research and author teams have come to understand and to make sense of who, what, when, and where related to primary care and public health collaboration. The teams have also extensively explored how to build successful collaborations by understanding factors that influence them and why we should bother in the first place.
The content of this toolkit draws on the results of a four and a half year program of research that explored collaboration between primary care and public health in Canada. The program of research addressed the following major research questions:
- What is the nature of current primary care and public health collaborations in Canada?
- What are the structures and processes required to build successful collaborations between public health and primary care (at intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, and systemic levels)?
- What are the roles that health care practitioners can and do play in building local collaborations between primary care and public health?
A number of sources of data were used to support the content of the toolkit including:
- A scoping literature review of international research on primary care and public health collaboration,
- Interviews with over 70 key informants across Canada,
- Environmental scans from three provinces describing the structures of public health and primary care,
- A q-methodology study exploring predominant viewpoints about primary care and public health by key stakeholders in Canada,
- Ten in-depth case studies from three provinces. See Canadian Foundation for Health Improvement Final Report.
