Patients, their families, and caregivers have unique insights about themselves and what matters when they are receiving health care services. Through their lived experience, patients bring valuable firsthand perspectives to research that help lead to new and better ways of delivering care that will improve the health of all people in Canada.
Today, the Honorable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Health, announced a combined investment of more than $68 million over five years from the Government of Canada, the Government of Ontario, and provincial partners to support the ongoing work of patient-oriented research in Ontario through its SPOR SUPPORT Unit. The SPOR Support for People and Patient-Oriented Research and Trials (SUPPORT) Unit connects research with patient needs so that evidence-based solutions can be applied to health care.
The Ontario SPOR SUPPORT Unit (OSSU) is proud of the impact it achieved in its first phase of SPOR funding. For example, OSSU's demonstration projects IMPACT Awards aimed to help make Ontario's health system one that prioritizes patients, their health care experience, and their health outcomes. One of these projects, the Comparison of Outcomes and Access to Congestive Heart failure (COACH) trial, led by Dr. Douglas Lee, examined a novel health systems strategy that improves safety and efficiency for patients who visit the emergency department with heart failure. The intervention employed in the COACH randomized trial has been applied to transform care within Ontario and other jurisdictions for acute heart failure, one of the leading reasons for hospitalization in North America.
This investment is provided as part of Canada's Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR), a pan-Canadian initiative dedicated to integrating the voices of patients in research and health care. SPOR is led by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) with support from partners across the country.
