Cardiac Services BC has a service level agreement with the health authorities. This agreement assigns roles and responsibilities to Cardiac Services BC and to the health authorities.
Cardiac Services BC role:
- We set provincial standards for access to cardiac services and ensure appropriate and timely triage of patients.
- We standardize practice protocols utilizing current evidence and best practices to improve the quality of patient care.
- We determine priority and allocating sufficient "life support" resources within cardiac services to best meet patient needs.
- We identify and prioritize new emerging technologies and initiatives.
We also develop provincial cardiac service and capital requirement plans. Where substantive increases in volumes or new technologies require significant new investment in capital equipment or infrastructure, the parties will collaborate to secure required resources, collecting and analyzing data to:
- foster quality
- plan, project and fund cardiac services delivered by the regional health authorities
- generate and analyze quality of care reports
- collect, report and manage wait list and wait time data
- provide data analysis expertise to support quality assurance for practitioners
- monitor and evaluate health authority performance and
- undertake research and outcomes analysis.
Health authorities are responsible for:
- providing cardiac services within the context of a provincial program including selected low volume highly specialized/complex cases
- having an overall regional cardiac services plan in place including primary care/prevention, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation and secondary prevention services that, within available resources, maximizes access to all residents of the region
- providing programs and services to support the plan
- providing all capital resources within available funding, including the necessary equipment required to deliver the services. where substantive increases in volumes or new technologies require significant new investment in capital equipment or infrastructure, the parties will collaborate to secure required resources
- adhering to standards of patient care adopted provincially or nationally by programs of similar scope and size
- submitting timely, accurate and complete data to the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) and Cardiac Services BC databases.
In 2004, Canada's first ministers agreed to work to reduce wait times and to publicly report wait times for eight priority procedures. Cardiac Services BC has accountability for reporting on wait times for coronary artery bypass grafts (CABG) performed in British Columbia.
