Relative urgency for referral from primary care to rheumatologists: the Priority Referral Score.

Objective: Timely access to rheumatology consultation is fundamental to appropriate and effective management of patients with musculoskeletal and autoimmune diseases. Yet, for a variety of reasons, limited and delayed access is commonplace. Moreover, information exchange for referral is often inadequate or poorly communicated.

The Western Canada Waiting List Project: development of a priority referral score for hip and knee arthroplasty.

Background: Recognizing the concerns about long waiting times to see some specialists in Canada, and the burden this places on both primary care and specialist clinicians, the Western Canada Waiting List (WCWL) undertook the Primary Care Project. The goal was to develop a valid, reliable, standardized prioritization tool for use by primary care providers in making referrals to specialists. WCWL is a 20-partner collaboration committed to addressing long waiting times to access scheduled health care services.

Quality councils as catalysts and leaders in quality improvement: the experience of the health quality council in Saskatchewan.

Quality councils are an increasingly common phenomenon in Canada. The Health Quality Council in Saskatchewan, the largest such council in Canada, is similar to other councils in that it reports publicly on quality of care, but it differs in that it has an explicit, central role to support quality improvement activities. The HQC strives to gain buy-in and cooperation from provider groups, even those identified as having suboptimal care, by offering them quality improvement training, measurement tools, information about best practices and advice from experts in change management, group psychology, process redesign and operations research.