In fact, while Melissa Giesbrecht’s study model is focusing on end-of-life care, it could be applied to any sort of health services.
She explained it’s like a cookie recipe, taking important factors in determining where services should be located.
“For example, we take into consideration community isolation, vulnerability, community readiness, as well as population demographics,” Giesbrecht said. “We take the important factors from there and kind of order them and rank them to what’s most important, run them through Geographical Information Spacial (GIS) Analysis and then that basically spits out all of the communities that are high strength needing those criteria.”
That’s where Lloydminster came in. Giesbrecht said the Border City was highly ranked in the study.
With that information in hand, the researcher is now conducting interviews to get a better idea as to what’s happening locally, how services are being provided and seeing if Lloydminster would be a good place to create a secondary palliative care hub, which would connect with larger centres through video or teleconferencing to specialists in urban areas.
“This would be able to create just a little hub, cluster of services in Lloydminster that’s focused on palliative care,” Giesbrecht explained. “It’s more about just being able to have that expertise in training in palliative care because some just don’t have basically anything.”
The study is being led by a team of investigators from Simon Fraser University (Drs. Valorie Crooks and Nadine Schuurman, McMaster University (Dr. Allison Williams), Dalhousie University (Dr. Heather Castelden) and Trent University (Dr. Mark Skinner).
The goal is to figure out which factors need to be considered when identifying rural and remote Canadian communities that are in need of and are ready to enhance palliative care services. Information gathered will help with the creation of a decision-making model for such services.
To view the full article, please visit the Lloydminster Source.
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