Illustration featuring three healthcare providers with speech bubbles beside their heads: one with a medical cross, one with a computer monitor and one with a house.

Enhancing Integrated Care

Enhancing Integrated Care helps primary and community care organizations strengthen integrated team-based care models, including virtual care, making access easier and helping to ease pressure on emergency departments.

Around one in five emergency department visits happen because of limited access to primary care. Enhancing Integrated Care will bring 100 teams together to share knowledge and implement integrated care approaches that help bolster social and healthcare systems, addressing hospital overcrowding.

Illustration of three healthcare providers sitting at a table with bubbles containing a medical cross, outline of a head with a heart at the top and a house below them signifying integrated team-based care.

What is integrated care?

Integrated care is a collaborative approach where healthcare professionals from various disciplines—such as primary care providers, specialists, allied health professionals, mental health professionals, pharmacists and community and social workers—work together to provide coordinated, patient-centred care. This ensures patients receive the right care at the right time. The goal is to improve health outcomes, reduce service duplication, and lower costs by offering more efficient, coordinated care.

We built relationships and expanded our collaboration. We set up hospital consults with a treatment facility and have seen significant expansion in the availability of addictions medicine consultations. This program provided a venue for collaboration and brought together a group of likeminded individuals and what we have created is significant."

- A participant of Bridge-to-Home, a past program aimed at improving care transitions

What types of projects are teams working on?

Enhanced Integrated Care builds on the success of recent HEC initiatives. These past projects are examples of the type of work that could be further strengthened through this offering:

The Annex (PDF): A primary care clinic in a library offering follow-up and routine care to unattached patients, helping prevent emergency department visits and readmissions.
Enhancing Primary Care Access to Specialist Consultant: Using connected medicine models like RACE™ and BASE™, primary care providers can access real-time specialist advice to improve care planning and timely access.
Carbonear Impact Clinic (PDF): A partnership between an emergency department and family health team to redirect patients to a clinic for acute care, chronic disease management, and attachment to a family doctor.
Integrated Virtual Care (PDF): A virtual care model connecting patients to doctors and team members for virtual and in-person primary care.
Bridge-to-Home: A patient-oriented care bundle to improve safety and support during transitions from hospital to home.
Integrated Virtual Care Framework for Primary Care-Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services (NLHS) Western Zone: A virtual care framework for primary care, incorporating existing frameworks that focus on person and family-centered care, quality improvement and evaluation.
Project ECHO™ Community of Practice Approach (PDF): A virtual training model that builds staff capacity to manage complex dementia cases and avoid emergency department visits.

Check back for more information on the progress of the teams, and the projects they’re working on.

How we’re supporting teams

Teams include team-based primary and community care organizations, supported by:

Seed funding up to $10,000.
Expert coaches who help to address challenges, sustain improvements and plan for long-term success.
Proven tools and evidence-informed resources for implementing and measuring what works.
Virtual learning and networking to share knowledge, celebrate successes and drive collective progress.

Teams will be supported to pursue their goals while building essential skills in equity, cultural safety, patient engagement and safety. They’ll also explore key topics like quality improvement and working in partnership with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities.

Expand your participation—and your impact

This offering is part of Care Forward, a larger initiative that provides funding and learning supports to drive impact on four key priorities: expanding access to care and easing pressure on emergency departments, helping more people age where they call home, advancing person-centred long-term care and supporting the health workforce. Register for Right Care Challenge and explore offerings that are already underway.

Right Care Challenge

Open to health and social care teams ensuring people get the right care, at the right time, in the right place —all while helping reduce avoidable emergency department visits.