CIHR Institute of Health Services and Policy Research
In partnership with
Conference of Provincial / Territorial Deputy Ministers of Health
Health Canada
| Important Dates | |
| Opportunity Launched | June 2006 |
| Content Last Updated | (No updates since launch) |
| September 1, 2006 | Registration Deadline - Registration packages must be courier stamped by this date. |
| October 1, 2006 | Full applications must be courier stamped by this date. |
| January 1, 2007 | Anticipated notification of decision. |
| February 1, 2007 | Anticipated start date. |
| Funds Available | |
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CIHR's contribution to the amount available for this initiative is subject to availability of funds voted annually to CIHR by parliamentary appropriations, and the conditions that may be attached to them.
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| Summary | |
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A key part of CIHR's mandate is to promote research and knowledge translation initiatives designed to improve health services and strengthen the Canadian health care system. The purpose of this Request for Applications is to fund: (1) pilot projects in areas where new knowledge regarding the relationship between wait times and health has been deemed a priority; (2) research syntheses and pilot projects in identified priority areas relevant to improving access to appropriate health services. Applicants interested in seeking multi-year funds to conduct more comprehensive projects in these areas should submit to CIHR's open grants competition, or its Partnerships for Health System Improvement competition. It is expected that this targeted investment will lead to an enriched information and evidence base on which decisions focused on improving access to appropriate health care services for Canadians can be made. | |
Background
Partners
Objectives
Eligibility
Allowable Costs
Review Process and Evaluation Criteria
General CIHR Guidelines
Conditions of Funding
Communications Requirements
Monitoring, Performance Measurement and Evaluation
How to Apply
Contact Information
Description of Partners
Canadians are passionate about their health care system. Most Canadians visit at least one health care provider during the course of a year, and individual experiences with the health care system are mostly positive. Yet, people are becoming less confident that health care will be there when they need it. Tension between public expectations regarding timely access to appropriate health services and current wait times for some services has not gone unnoticed by health care managers and policy-makers in Canada.
In 2004, a national consultation exercise (Listening for Direction II) was undertaken to identify research priorities among health services administrators and policy-makers.1 Ten priority research themes emerged and "timely access to quality care for all" was a significant and recurring priority among those who participated in these consultations. CIHR's Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (IHSPR) subsequently became the lead national organization responsible for funding research and knowledge translation activities in this area. More information is available at Listening for Direction II.
In September 2004, First Ministers agreed to build on past efforts to reduce wait times and improve access by making the following commitments in the Ten-Year Plan to Strengthen Health Care:
The full text of the Ten-Year Plan is available.
A crucial step in developing evidence-based benchmarks is to understand the existing body of research and learn from the experiences of jurisdictions in Canada and abroad. A second important step is having a clear picture of where further work is needed by identifying gaps where there is currently insufficient evidence to support such benchmarks. In February and December 2005, the Provincial/Territorial Ministries of Health partnered with CIHR to fund initiatives designed to inform their work in meeting the benchmark-related commitments in the Ten-Year Plan. In May 2005, a number of initiatives were funded in the areas of cancer care (colorectal, lung, gastrointestinal and solid organ malignancies, as well as radiation therapy), joint replacement (hip and knee) and sight restoration (cataract removal and corneal transplantation). The complete list of funded projects from this competition and summaries of the materials provided by those teams on October 15, 2005 are available. This work informed the development of Canada's first ever wait time benchmarks for health services, announced by Provincial/Territorial Ministers on December 12, 2005.
The first objective within the present RFA is to fund pilot projects in areas where new knowledge regarding the relationship between wait times and health has been deemed a priority. In April 2006 the teams funded through the February 2005 initiative submitted final reports to CIHR that identified priority areas and questions for future research, particularly with respect to the types of relationships between patient characteristics such as (e.g. age, clinical severity or stage of illness, co-morbidities, etc.), health service wait times, and mortality, health status or quality of life. For more information, consult the summary of priority areas identified in the reports provided by those teams. In these priority areas, pilot project proposals eligible for funding should be guided by the gaps identified in those reports. For other areas, successful applicants will need to provide, as part of the application, equivalent gap analyses, to justify the importance of, and priority that should be given to, pilot work in the identified clinical and/or management area.
In December 2005, CIHR hosted an invitational workshop to discuss and begin to provide more specificity to the strategic research and knowledge translation agenda related to the Listening for Direction II topic "timely access to quality care for all". The workshop was seen as one of a number of inputs into the development of a long-term research agenda on this topic, and was intended as a complementary source of recommendations on investment priorities. The second objective in this RFA is to fund research syntheses and pilot projects in the priority areas identified at this workshop. Among these priority areas are research on standards and common approaches that help to define appropriate care by identifying when a patient truly needs to be on a wait list (appropriateness); identifying the root causes of wait time problems; and research on ways to improve patients flows by building on operations research approaches that have found success in other sectors and examining how organizational design, policies and incentives affect wait times. For more information, consult the report summarizing the outcomes from the workshop entitled Mapping A Strategic Research Agenda For Timely Access to Quality Health Care. Any of the areas identified in that report is eligible under the terms of this second objective.
In summary, the purpose of this Request for Applications is to fund: (1) pilot projects in areas where new knowledge regarding the relationship between wait times and health has been deemed a priority in the summary of reports and (2) research syntheses and pilot projects in priority areas identified in Mapping A Strategic Research Agenda For Timely Access to Quality Health Care as relevant to improved access to appropriate health services. Applicants interested in seeking multi-year funds to conduct this type of work should submit to CIHR's open grants competition or to its Partnerships for Health System Improvement competition.
CIHR's Institute of Health Services and Policy Research is dedicated to identifying and developing collaborations with other CIHR institute(s), branch(es) or office(s), funding organizations and stakeholders to enhance the availability of funding for this strategic initiative, and to create, where appropriate, opportunities for knowledge exchange and translation related to the scope of this particular initiative. Applicants are invited to visit the Descriptions of Partners to find a list of partners and their respective mandates and/or strategic interests. This list will continue to evolve as new partners join in this initiative. The specific research foci and requirements for each partner are outlined in the section "Objectives".
The specific objectives of this initiative are:
Eligibility criteria for all CIHR research funding programs apply. The business office of the institution of an eligible Nominated Principal Applicant generally administers CIHR funds. Please refer to the Eligibility Requirements for CIHR Grants and Awards regarding the eligibility requirements for individuals and institutions.
Applicants should review the Tri-Agency (CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC) financial administration guidelines Use of Grant Funds for a complete listing and description of allowable costs and activities.
The full application must provide a detailed justification of all costs.
In addition, the following expenditures will be considered eligible for funding received through this Request for Applications.
Full applications will be initially screened by CIHR staff to ensure that: (a) all proposed expenditures are eligible; (b) all materials comply with format requirements and include appropriate documentation; (c) reporting requirements are acknowledged;
Prior to merit review, appropriate representatives of the funding partners will have access to anonymous project titles and summaries to review proposals for relevance to their strategic interests. This information will be used for decisions regarding financial commitments to this RFA and will be conducted independently of and will have no impact on the merit review process.
A CIHR merit review committee will evaluate the full applications. The committee may be drawn from one of CIHR's pre-existing committees or may be created specifically for this Request for Applications. Committee members are selected based on suggestions from many sources including the institute(s) / portfolio(s) and partner(s), following CIHR's Policy on Confidentiality, Conflict of Interest and Privacy Issues in Peer and Relevance Review (CCIP). For information on CIHR's peer review process in general, see Peer Review.
Merit review will be conducted in accordance with The CIHR Peer Review Process: Policies and Responsibilities of Grants Committee Members, including the standard evaluation criteria described under "Factors for Assessment" (section 6.2).
In addition, the following evaluation criteria specific to this Request for Applications will apply.
Relevance and Potential Impact:
Scientific Merit:
The Applicants' Productivity, Experience and Training:
Full applications will be assessed and rated by the merit review committee using the evaluation criteria listed above. Relevance and potential impact, relative to the objectives of the RFA, and scientific merit, will be given equal weight in the assessment of the applications reviewed by the committee. The committee will then rate each application, using the CIHR Merit Review scale.
On completion of merit review, appropriate representatives of the funding partners will receive the ranking list, merit scores (ratings) and recommendations of the merit review committee with regards to funding level, for the submitted applications that fall in the fundable range. The list will be used for funding decision-making purposes; the identities of applicants will not be known to the partners at that time.
This Request for Applications will follow the General Guidelines for Grant Programs. Applicants are encouraged to demonstrate the use of gender and sex-based analysis in applications.
All conditions specified in CIHR General Grants and Awards Policies shall apply to applications funded through this Request for Applications. Conditions cover areas such as Applicant and Institutional Responsibilities, Ethics, Official language policy, Access to Information and Privacy Acts, and Acknowledgement of CIHR Support. Successful applicants will be informed of any special financial conditions prior to the release of funds or when they receive CIHR's Authorization for Funding (AFF) document.
In order to meet the information needs of health care decision-makers, funded applicants will be expected to prepare a final report. The researcher will make this report available to CIHR. CIHR will forward this reports to officials reporting to federal, provincial and territorial Ministers of Health. Reports should be in a form and format suitable to these audiences, and the Executive Summary will be written in a form and format as prescribed by CIHR. CIHR reserves the right to publish this report on the CIHR website, and requests that the report will be made available by the research teams on a website of their choice, to which reference can be made on the CIHR web site.
Access to Information Act and Privacy Act, and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)
All personal information collected by CIHR about applicants is used to review applications, to recruit reviewers, to administer and monitor grants and awards, to compile statistics, and to promote and support health research in Canada. Consistent with these purposes, applicants should also expect that information collected by CIHR may be shared as described in Use and Disclosure of Personal Information Provided to CIHR for Peer Review.
CIHR as a federal entity is subject to the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act, therefore the requirements of these two statutes will apply to all information located in CIHR's premises including, without limitation, cost-sharing agreements related to this Request for Applications and all matters pertaining thereto.
While respecting the application of the Privacy Act to federal entities, all signing parties involved in a collaborative agreement will also be bound by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). All personal information (as identified by the PIPEDA) collected, used or disclosed in the course of any commercial activity under collaborative agreements related to the Request for Applications will be collected, used and disclosed in compliance with the PIPEDA.
Grant recipients are required to acknowledge CIHR, its institutes and partners in any communication or publication related to the project. See CIHR General Grants and Awards Policies, Acknowledgement of CIHR's Support for details on CIHR's communication requirements. The contributing institutes / partners will be identified on the Authorization for Funding and decision letter.
Grant recipients are required to acknowledge the financial assistance received from the Federal, Provincial and Territorial Ministries of Health and CIHR Institutes in any communication or publication related to their project. However, all acknowledgements should confirm that the conclusions and opinions found in the reports or other publications are solely those of their authors and that no official endorsement by Federal, Provincial and Territorial Ministries of Health or CIHR is intended or should be inferred.
The intellectual property rights in all works produced as a result of these grants will belong to the grant recipients.More specifically, copyright to the report above will belong to the authors of those reports, but the authors will grant the federal, provincial and territorial governments free, irrevocable and unlimited sole licenses to use, copy, publish, and translate those reports throughout the world. Grant recipients will not publish any of the report mentioned above, nor the information contained in those reports, for a period of 30 days from their actual dates of receipt by CIHR.
CIHR is committed to demonstrating results to Canadians for the money invested in health research. Therefore, processes for monitoring progress and appropriate use of funds, as well as for performance measurement and program evaluation are in place. As a result, funding recipients must:
The application process is comprised of two steps: Registration and Full Application.
Review the application instructions provided in How to Apply for Funding.
Select "Operating Grants" (Registration and Application) from the Grant Programs Application Packages.
Additional instructions must be followed for this RFA:
a) Research Module:
In the Research Funding Program section of the Research Module (page 8 of the web form printed report), select "Strategic Initiative/RFA" and enter the title of this RFA.
The research proposal section of the Research Module for this initiative is limited to a maximum of 6 pages, including the Summary of Research Proposal (p. 9). Figures, tables and references may be listed in additional pages.
You must clearly indicate in the Summary of Research Proposal (p. 9), which of the following priorities your project is addressing:
b) Common CV Module
You must submit full Common CV modules for the Nominated Principal Applicant, Principal Applicants, Principal Decision-maker Applicants and one Co-Applicant on the team. Only abbreviated CVs (maximum 3 pages) are required for any additional Co-Applicants. Full CVs will not be considered for these applicants. The first page of the abbreviated CV should only include the contact information of the Co-Applicant (mailing address, telephone number, fax number, e-mail address, and CIHR PIN number). This information must be kept separate from the rest of the CV because it will not be forwarded to reviewers. The second and third page of the CV should include information on current grants held, relevant publications from the last five years, and expertise keywords.
All applicants including Decision Makers must have a CV and a CIHR PIN number.
Send the completed registration and application packages by courier to:
RE: "Timely Access to Quality Health Care - Evidence and Application: Research Syntheses and Pilot Projects"
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
Room 97, 160 Elgin Street
Address locator: 4809A
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0W9
For questions on CIHR funding guidelines, how to apply, and the peer review process contact:
Tamara Marshall
Program Delivery Officer
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
Telephone: (613) 941-0861
Fax: (613) 954-1800
Email: tmarshall@cihr-irsc.gc.ca
For questions about this initiative and research objectives contact:
Kim Gaudreau
Associate, Strategic Initiatives
CIHR Institute of Health Services and Policy Research and
CIHR Institute of Population and Public Health
Telephone: (613) 957-6128
Fax: (613) 954-1800
Email: kgaudreau@cihr-irsc.gc.ca
Note: Additional partners are expected to join this funding initiative over the coming year.
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
CIHR is Canada's major federal funding agency for health research. Its objective is to excel, according to internationally accepted standards of scientific excellence, in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians, more effective health services and products and a strengthened Canadian health care system.
CIHR - Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (IHSPR)
CIHR - IHSPR is dedicated to supporting innovative research, capacity-building and knowledge translation initiatives designed to improve the way health care services are organized, regulated, managed, financed, paid for, used and delivered, in the interest of improving the health and quality of life of all Canadians.
Conference of Provincial / Territorial Deputy Ministers of Health
The Conference of Provincial/Territorial Deputy Ministers of Health provides leadership on a wide range of health care issues important to all Canadians. As the members of the Conference, Canada's thirteen Provincial/Territorial Deputy Ministers of Health address common challenges facing all jurisdictions, share information and innovative practices to improve the operation of health care services, and work collaboratively to reform health care in Canada. Currently chaired by New Brunswick, the Conference reports to Provincial/Territorial Ministers of Health.
Health Canada
Health Canada is the federal department responsible for helping Canadians maintain and improve their health, while respecting individual choices and circumstances. By working with others, Health Canada strives to:
1 Organizations that partnered to conduct this consultation include: Canadian Health Services Research Foundation, CIHR's IHSPR, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the Canadian Coordinating Office for Health Technology Assessment (now the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health), the Advisory Committee on Governance and Accountability of the Federal/ Provincial/ Territorial Conference of Deputy Ministers of Health, and the Health Statistics Division of Statistics Canada.
