Addressing the Clinical Care Gap
The Centre for Effective Practice is an initiative at the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto. Its primary goal is to address the growing gap between best evidence and current primary care practice. Its focus is to engage primary care practitioners on an inter-professional basis, regardless of setting or training, in the activity of optimizing best practice.
Primary care providers often complain of "information overload" and the inability to stay current with the latest research. Additional pressures on practitioners, such as expanding scopes of practice to care for sicker patients and sharing care with colleagues across disciplines, magnify the impact of the knowledge gap. With the growing importance of primary care within the health system of the future, the importance of addressing the clinical care gap is obvious.
The Centre's objective is to identify barriers to optimal practice and produce practical solutions (e.g., clinical toolkits, practice aids, patient-focused materials) to address these barriers. The Centre brings together busy clinicians, consumers of health care and researchers to identify, develop, disseminate and evaluate these unique solutions.
Using a strong inter-professional approach, the Centre draws upon the Faculty of Medicine's expertise in research, Knowledge Translation, and education. The goal – for practitioners and their patients – is better care that is easier to deliver and receive.
