DLSPH and UHN Launch Health Policy Blog
November 8/2018
By: Dr. Kevin Smith and Professor Adalsteinn Brown
Steini Brown and Kevin Smith launch Health Policy Blog
Like every other domain of science, health care leaders must manage the onslaught of new evidence and insight. The number of papers published each month that describe what to do or what not to do to improve health care would overwhelm even the most diligent student, let alone busy a busy manager or policy advisor. It also takes away the chance to reflect on individual papers and what they say about how our health systems are evolving.
As Dean of Canada’s largest school of public health and health systems and CEO of Canada’s largest research hospital responsible for many patients, we too experience this time crunch and want to help by unpacking new health system research. Over the next year, we are going to pick a paper each month and use that paper as an opportunity to talk about how our health system is changing and what we can do to help or guide that transformation. We will do this as a blog and see whether we – and any readers – find it a useful exercise and we welcome your feedback.
For the first paper, we’ve exploring how how patient complaints can help improve our health-care system.
We’ve chosen a publication by two faculty based at the London School of Economics on what complaints can tell us about health system performance. The paper explores novel methods to analyze and leverage patient complaint data to help prioritize, target and guide quality improvement efforts. It also points to the importance of stronger integration of hospital and community care for better care that is organized around the patient.
Adalsteinn Brown is Dean and Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Kevin Smith is President and CEO of University Health Network.