Dear Executive Directors/Administrative Leads,
On Feb 2nd we shared Minister Jones launch of the Your Health: A Plan for Connected and Convenient Care. This plan includes an investment of $30 million to create up to 18 new teams and help bridge the gap in accessing interprofessional primary care for vulnerable, marginalized, and unattached patients to ensure they are able to connect to care where and when they need it. While the number of 18 was noted in the plan, the Ministry may also be looking at expansion of EXISTING teams and new satellite locations and will share their expectations as they work through their internal planning.
As we await further information around next steps in the funding implementation process, we encourage all teams to begin thinking about and preparing for the call for proposals. We expect Ministry/OH will release guidance documents towards the end of March with a submission timeline of end of April. We have requested Ministry/OH to provide a technical briefing and review of the relevant documents and process once finalized. We will share the date of this webcast once confirmed.
To get an idea of what the application template MIGHT look like, here is the link to the 2017-19 IPC Team Expansion Business Case Template. We anticipate the new application process will be similar in terms of structure and big categories for content. Below are also number of principles from the previous process that you may want to keep in mind to help create a successful submission:
Planning Principles
- Readiness for early implementation
- Population health based planning approach
- Promote equitable access to interdisciplinary primary care across the OHT
- Enhance access to appropriate, linguistically and culturally sensitive care and services
- Engage patients and caregivers in planning
- Integrate and collaborate with local health, social and community service providers
- Develop model for comprehensive, continuous and coordinated care
- Enhance attachment, accessibility and timeliness of primary care
- Enhanced quality improvement and safety
- Reduce barriers to access to care for vulnerable populations (e.g., Francophone and Indigenous populations)
- In areas where teams exist, it would be optimal to leverage these existing teams to minimize administrative costs and expend the majority of the allocation on direct patient care.
Implementation Principles
- Services/programs reflect OHT population health needs
- Services/programs are open to the wider community (i.e. populations beyond the rostered or registered patients)
- Patient and community engagement is a component of planning and governance
- Health equity is a focus of programs/services
- Increased programming that is planned and delivered in a culturally sensitive manner, with special focus on addressing the needs of disadvantaged communities, including Indigenous peoples and Francophone Ontarians in Ontario
- Focus on quality, including reporting on key performance indicators
- Governance structure that includes community members to ensure local population needs are met
- Improved attachment and access to primary care across OHT
- Embedded care coordination and care navigation in primary care settings
Please also note that the $30M is inclusive of increases in base funding for those teams experiencing overhead budget pressures – the process for increases in your base budget will be included in your annual operating plan which is set to be released imminently. Please make sure you join Fernando Tavares for a Q&A on March 28th @ 12:00pm where he will also touch upon the process to apply for increased base funding and provide an overview of this year’s annual operating plan and governance attestation documents. Register here.
As always, please contact us if you have any questions.