Overview

Health system foundations for Sláintecare implementation

The Foundations project seeks to learn from the Irish health system’s response to COVID-19 and to inform health reform implementation. The full title of the project is ‘Health system foundations for Sláintecare implementation in 2020 and beyond – co-producing a Sláintecare Living Implementation Framework with Evaluation: Learning from the Irish health system’s response to COVID-19.’ A protocol was published to guide the research project which can be accessed here

The Foundations Project is a Health Research Board funded research project funded under the Applied Partnership Award programme. The project commenced in 2019. The project team is led by Principal Investigator Dr Sara Burke and the project steering group is currently chaired by Dr Philip Crowley, the Health Service Executive’s National Director for Strategy and Research. Up to September 2021, it was chaired by the Foundations’ lead knowledge user, Laura Magahy.

The project is examining and monitoring the COVID-19 response on an ongoing basis with particular focus on ways in which it furthers or inhibits the implementation of Sláintecare, the major national health reform programme currently being implemented by the government.

The project is in its final year and a number of papers have been published with findings produced to date. Indicators of system performance are also presented on this website .

The aims of the project for 2022 are to:

1. Undertake research on specific aspects of Ireland’s health system response to COVID-19 in the areas of governance and emerging new pathways to care, with a key focus on the mechanisms that could inform/accelerate/inhibit Sláintecare’s implementation. This will involve a range of research activities, including:

• Content analysis of publicly available data; and
• Qualitative interviews with key informants.

2. Document our methodological approach, with a view to publishing a paper on the experience of implementing a co-production process in applied health policy research2.

3. Feed learning and evidence from the research into the Irish health system research.

The original aim of the project in 2019 was to utilise the development and implementation of new health regions to devise a Regional Integrated Care Area (RICA) Living Implementation Framework with Evaluation (LIFE) and this would act as a mechanism to inform overall Sláintecare implementation. With the arrival of COVID-19, in conjunction with research partners, the focus of the research project changed from learning from the regions to learning from the COVID-19 health system response. The intention is to link evidence, policy and practice, co-producing research that feeds into real-world Sláintecare implementation. Co-design and partnership approaches are inherent to this research so that the project team and health system is continuously learning and refining as the research progresses.