Goals
BRIC NS aims to engage, mobilize, educate and guide health professionals, researchers, policymakers, students and citizens across Nova Scotia and facilitate collaborative efforts to:
- identify primary and integrated health care priorities that can be addressed through research
- form research teams
- connect and form collaborations with like-minded research teams in other provinces
- develop successful research proposals
- secure matching funds
- conduct research and disseminate results
- work with policymakers and system administrators as they put the research findings into action
Priorities
BRIC NS has identified a number of research priorities. These will help to guide the network’s mobilization and facilitation efforts.
- Integration of care for those with or at risk of complex needs: health and social needs

2. Innovations in primary and integrated service delivery (with a focus on multi-complexity)
- Optimizing community primary healthcare and integrated care to better meet the needs of those with multi-complexity
- Service redesign
- Collaborative teams
- Chronic disease
- Comprehensive team for those with very complex needs
- Mental health
- Vulnerable children and youth: autism, those in care
- Disabilities: adult care and adult residential care
- Dementia
- Models beyond PHC collaborative team care ready to help those in immediate need
- E.g. for unattached patients following discharge, major diagnosis …
- Vulnerable people with nowhere to go for care
- Service redesign
- Use of decision aids, tools, technology
3. Bringing evidence forward for the improvement of effective, efficient and timely care
- Implementation and quality improvement studies
- What works where and why: attachment of unattached; reducing ED use; easing costs of complexity
- Evaluation
- Knowledge translation
- Policy, public, research
4. Enabling the primary healthcare workforce to meet the needs of patients with multi-complexity and future demands for a range of services.
- Supports to enable efficient, effective team functioning
- Practice facilitation
- Staffing (initial recruitment AND retention)
- Comprehensive teams
- Integration of community-based services
- Additional supports for differing practice population case-mix
- Prevention
- Key elements of teams to care for those with chronic conditions
- Enhancing provider skills and competency
- Attention to cultural appropriateness and person-centered care
- Family practice readiness needs to better match community needs
Last Updated: February 10, 2022