Advancing Equity-Focused Implementation Science: A Multiple Case Study of Best Practices for Community Health Workers in Primary Health Care

Health care has been very strained over the past few years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has caused many family doctors to leave their practice, for example, through retirement. Inequities in care, where certain communities face barriers to seeing their primary care provider (e.g., their family doctor), have also gotten worse. In this project we plan to implement better ways of serving communities who face barriers to care by supporting providers called Community Health Workers to provide the best care possible. We will help to train Community Health Workers at 4 health care organizations to better serve their communities. Community health workers are hired from the communities they serve, and they help to coordinate the different parts of care in health and social services (e.g., both the family doctor and newcomer settlement services) and promote the health of people who face barriers to care. We have built a new way of planning and implementing best practices to promote better care for people from communities that face barriers to being healthy. We will test this new approach by implementing better practices in the four organizations, and we will use our results to support a group of policy and health care leaders who want to support Community Health Workers to provide better care that helps to coordinate services around patients' needs. The results of our project will inform research, health care policy, and health care leaders to introduce best practices for Community Health Workers in primary health care.