Clinical trial NCT00182286: Evaluation of Continuity of Care at a Health Service Organization
Official title: The Evaluation of the Continuity of Care at the Group Health Centre, A Unique Multi-Specialty, Multi-Disciplinary Health Service Organization
Study type: OBSERVATIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Conditions: Diabetes Mellitus
Keywords: Diabetes
Continuity of Care
Patient Perspective
Health Service Organization
Lead sponsor: McMaster University
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Canadian Health Services Research Foundation
name: Group Health Centre, Sault Ste Marie, ON
name: Group Health Centre
name: Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care
First posted: 2005-09-16
Enrollment: 342
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Observational model: DEFINED_POPULATION
Time perspective: OTHER

Brief summary: This project was conducted with patients at a multi-disciplinary, multi-specialty health services organization serving 44,000 rostered patients in Northern Ontario. It investigated continuity of care for patients with diabetes in the areas of barriers and potential solutions to, and correlates of continuity; and variability in costs associated with continuity of care and patient outcomes.

Detailed description: Continuity of care is a concept that has been garnering increased attention in the last few years. There have been multiple methods proposed by researchers for measuring continuity of care, most of which are based on proportions or ratios of visits to the same health care provider or centre. While a consistent method for measuring continuity of care is lacking, increased continuity of care using various definitions and measurement tools has been related to better well being, lower health care costs, better glucose control, and higher satisfaction but has also not been found to improve health outcomes in other scenarios. Whether a patient is better served by high sequential access to one provider or any provider within the same system or management team is controversial. Finally, patients' perceptions of continuity of care have not been generally evaluated or correlated with current measurement methods. This project was conducted with patients at the Group Health Centre in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, a multi-disciplinary, multi-specialty health services organization serving 44,000 rostered patients

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Adults (\>18 years)
* Diagnosis of diabetes mellitus (according to the definition used in 1999 by the Canadian Diabetes Association

Exclusion Criteria:

* Gestational diabetes
* Could not communicate in English
* Life expectancy or residency expectancy in Sault Ste Marie of less than three years

Primary outcomes:
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Sault Ste. Marie
country: Canada
facility: Group Health Centre
state: Ontario
Study officials:
affiliation: Group Health Centre
name: Hui Lee, MD FRCPC MSc
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
citation: Dolovich LR, Nair KM, Ciliska DK, Lee HN, Birch S, Gafni A, Hunt DL. The Diabetes Continuity of Care Scale: the development and initial evaluation of a questionnaire that measures continuity of care from the patient perspective. Health Soc Care Community. 2004 Nov;12(6):475-87. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2524.2004.00517.x.
citation: Nair KM, Dolovich LR, Ciliska DK, Lee HN. The perception of continuity of care from the perspective of patients with diabetes. Fam Med. 2005 Feb;37(2):118-24.