Integrated care aims to coordinate a patient’s care across community, primary and secondary care settings and between different providers in health and social care settings to meet the care needs of the population. There is widespread interest in pursuing integration to develop responsive, appropriate, and efficient health services that provide user centered care and/or to drive cost efficiencies through improved care pathways.

Ontario is pursuing a whole systems approach to integration through a reorganization into Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) where hospitals, doctors, and allied health providers work as a coordinated team to provide responsive, appropriate, and efficient health services. This report compares and characterizes integrated care reforms across four international comparators to identify promising policy supports for the implementation of integrated care initiatives in Ontario.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) accounts for over a quarter of the world’s total cases, and a third of the total deaths, from the COVID-19 pandemic (1-4). In the absence of a vaccine to prevent the transmission of the virus, LAC countries have introduced several public health, health system, and economic policies to reduce the spread and impacts of COVID-19 (4,5). However, contextual factors such as fragmented health systems, limited social safety nets, and high levels of informal employment and inequality have further challenged the response to the pandemic in many of these countries (4,6,7). Furthermore, these underlying conditions intensify the impact of COVID-19, particularly for the most disadvantaged, including the unemployed, informal, and low-income workers, many of whom live in overcrowded households (4,7). In this study, we aim to describe policy interventions in 10 LAC countries in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to compare these responses based on the experiences in two relatively high-performing jurisdictions, South Korea and Uruguay, and to support cross-jurisdictional policy learning for pandemic preparedness in the LAC region through knowledge exchange activities.

See more documents related to the project

This comparative profile was compiled to support an article on the The Comparative Performance of the Canadian and Australian Health Systems for the journal Healthcare Management Forum written by Donald J. Philippon, Gregory P. Marchildon, Jeffrey Braithwaite, Kristiana Ludlow and Claire Boyling. As federations with similar political cultures, Canada and Australia and their respective provinces and states provide useful comparisons in terms of health systems and policies.