Visual summary showing major milestones and progress timeline. Additional details below.
The 2023-2026 Health Canada grant will focus on five key activities centered around the Connecting People and Community for Living Well Model.
These activities will contribute further to the evidence base on how to build a system that supports people over their life course to live well in their own homes and communities.
Provincial team awarded a $1.4 million grant from Health Canada as part of the Health Canada Health Care Policy Contribution Program (HCPCP). The grant supported continuation of this work in five rural communities and the development of two main deliverables. These deliverables were informed by learnings from the applied research activities. See the Summary of Learnings.
During this period, the Connecting People and Community for Living Well Model was created as well as an infographic of grant activities and impact.
Wellbeing was identified as key concept in supporting healthy ageing across the lifespan. The initiative was renamed to ‘Connecting People and Community for Living Well’ to reflect partnerships and the focus on learning how to better support those in the community to ‘live well.’
Teams identified a gap in understanding the skills, knowledge and supports needed to grow and sustain shared planning and implementation of needed supports.
During this phase, an economic analysis of the work was completed and demonstrated that for Alberta Health Services – for every $1 spent, there was a return on investment (ROI) of:
With the support of the provincial PHC IGSI team, five PCNs and their respective communities began working locally to:
The provincial team established a monthly virtual meeting to bring stakeholders together for networking, education and knowledge sharing. This group was instrumental in developing and delivering four education workshops.
Impact on individuals - People living with dementia and carers reported increased awareness of, and access to, supports and education resources available locally.
Community outcomes - Bolstering multi-sector relationships at the community level increased local capacity to meet the needs of the aging population through community coalition development, and action planning across health, social, community, municipal and public sectors.
Health system impact measures - Participating communities showed that for those with a diagnosis of dementia, there was a trend of decrease in:
View PHC IGSI final evaluation report (2019) | summary
Grant funding through Alberta Health enabled launch of the Primary Health Care Integrated Geriatric Services Initiative (PHC IGSI) and the provincial team. This work aligned with 2 of the 3 outcomes outlined in the Alberta Dementia Strategy and Action Plan (ADSAP).
The pilot/demonstration phase was built around the Anticipating the Future Framework and focused on advancing integration between health and social services at a community level. Its focus was to increase capacity of community teams to provide ongoing care and support for those living in their community affected by dementia. This included those with a diagnosis of dementia and their carers.
Activities included increasing knowledge of dementia, improving primary care clinic processes, efforts to understand local level supports available for those affected by dementia, identifying gaps, and joint action planning at a community level between health and social partners.
Stakeholder engagement involving care partners of people living with dementia.
Environmental scan completed of geriatric services in Alberta’s Primary Care Networks (PCNs) completed by the Seniors Health Strategic Clinical Network. The scan revealed gaps in community services for people living with dementia and their carers.
