CHEPA offers a range of events including workshops, briefings and invitational exchanges with decision makers and researchers on a variety of policy relevant topics initiated by CHEPA researchers and in consultation with its partners. Through these events, CHEPA plays a  leadership role in communicating socially-relevant knowledge to policy makers and managers with the goal of informing policy and practice and in advancing the respective fields of health economics and health policy analysis.

For more information regarding CHEPA Exchange Events, please contact chepa@mcmaster.ca

Symposium on health policy scholarship

In November 2007, CHEPA hosted an international health policy symposium entitled Field of Dreams: Strengthening Health Policy Scholarship in Canada, which brought together health policy scholars from the U.S. and the U.K. along with Canadian health policy researchers and policymakers to reflect on the state of health policy scholarship in Canada. Outputs of this symposium are expected to influence health policy training programs and research infrastructure over the coming years. As one of the longest-standing applied health services research centres in Canada, CHEPA plays a unique role in serving and strengthening the country’s academic and policy communities through these types of events. To view a report on the symposium, click here.

Improving Access to Health Care, Social Services for the Homeless

The numerous complexities inherent in the lives of people who are homeless have a major impact on their ability and methods for accessing available health care and social services. A policy forum organized by the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis at McMaster University and the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, facilitated the sharing of information, perspectives and recommendations on homelessness. It involved policy and decision makers, practitioners and researchers who all have a role to play in improving the plight of the homeless.

The forum discussion was organized around two sessions, one dealing with individual access and barriers and the other focusing on systemic access and barriers to health care and social services.
Each session involved the presenting of extensive information on homelessness, followed by discussion on the current state of circumstances and various suggestions for improvement.
The forum, held on March 7, 2005, was facilitated by Brian Hutchison, former CHEPA director.

Forum Report

Options for Healthcare Financing: Implications for Sustainability

The health care financing and sustainability debate in Canada is fundamentally about the role of different sources of finance within our health care system:  public vs private, federal vs provincial. Meeting the policy challenges to sustain our system into the future requires that we understand clearly the implications of alternative configurations of these sources of  health care  finance. CHEPA  hosted a policy forum "Options for Healthcare Financing: Implications for Sustainability", on Friday, October 29th 2004, in Toronto. The forum explored the implications of alternative roles for the public and private sectors and the federal and provincial governments in the context of two specific policy challenges: pharmacare and the development of private sector finance.

Forum Report

Policy Issues for New and Emerging Genetic Services

CHEPA held a policy workshop on genetic health services in February 2003. The goal was to engage expert researchers, practitioners and policy makers in discussion of two key issues: (1) how genetic services could be adequately evaluated to determine their eligibility for public coverage; and as a sub-question (2) how economic evaluations could be used to support coverage decision-making.

Dr. Fiona Miller of McMaster University, and Dr Steve Morgan of the University of British Columbia made brief presentations on these topics. Participants then discussed these issues, concluding that:

• There was a need for a proactive and systematic process of evidence based assessment of genetic services.
• That to support this, decision makers and evaluators needed more guidance on the typical features and consequences of classes of genetic services.
• That sound economic assessments could be an important component of these deliberations, but they required standardized assessment data, some of which might derive from the use of precedents.
• And finally, that a coordinated approach across jurisdictions was both useful and complex. Such an approach would need to attend to the jurisdictional tensions concerning market access and public subsidy between the federal and provincial governments, and would have to attend to the need for both equity and jurisdictional autonomy across the provinces.

Roundtable on Making Research Knowledge Work

CHEPA held a roundtable on Making Research Knowledge Work in October 2002. What does it mean to build system capacity for research to become knowledge in action? The roundtable brought together participants from different system sectors - research organization directors, research funding agency decision-makers, and federal and provincial health policy decision-makers - to grapple with this challenge. Facilitated by Jonathan Lomas, Executive Director the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation, and co-chaired by John Lavis and Suzanne Ross, both from CHEPA, the roundtable was organized around three sessions: 1) Developing a Systematic Approach to Knowledge Transfer; 2) Measuring the Impact of Research Knowledge; and 3) Creating Bodies of Knowledge Around the Needs of Decision-Makers. Here are some of the highlights of the roundtable discussion:

• We need to move from knowledge transfer to knowledge exchange. This has multiple implications and actors. Research funders need to be more thoughtful about how to promote this.
• How do we build better relationships among system actors? We need to foster more and better interactions between system stakeholders in order to improve their understanding of different perspectives and cultures, different research needs, and different ways that stakeholders use research knowledge.
• Policymaker needs are complex. They draw on multiple and very different types of information. Moreover, for any particular policy area they are informing a wide variety of issues. Building better "bodies of knowledge" around policymaker, not researcher, questions will help policymakers integrate research knowledge into the policy deliberation process.
• What is health services research (HSR)? Health services researchers and funders should direct more attention to identifying the different contributions HSR can make. It is important to clarify the difference between categorizing/capturing/describing the existing stock of health services research, versus identifying areas for distilling and assessing the implications of existing research, and versus considering and prioritizing areas for advancing new health services research.

Click the title to view the following reports or purchase a copy ($5.00) by emailing chepa@mcmaster.ca.

Continuity in Home Care Workshop

Public Consultation Workshop

Primary Care Workshop