Contraception Access Research Team - Contraception Cost-effectiveness Modeling (CART-CCM)

Family planning is acknowledged to be one of the top ten public health advances of the millennium. Health policy supporting accessible family planning has proven value leading to population-level gains in terms of health equity in developed countries around the world. Canadian health care jurisdictions stand as one of the few among comparable countries that do not provide universal subsidized contraception. Canadian-context tools to support evidence-informed policies relating to contraception are not currently available. Development requires data on Canadian specific pregnancy determinants, and on the relation of these factors to a broad range of determinants of health. Many of these parameters have not been measured among Canadian populations. The Contraception Access Research Team (CART) brings together health system leaders, senior academic researchers from a broad range of disciplines, health service delivery professionals and stakeholder groups, to address BC's and Canada's most pressing family planning health service research questions. CART proposes to undertake development of Canada's first Contraception Cost-effectiveness Model (CCM), using data from BC. The CART-CCM will be used to create decision-making tools capable of supporting evidence-informed policies for optimal contraception strategies in BC and for adaptation to Canadian provinces, territories and federal health jurisdictions. At the end of this grant, our team of researchers and knowledge users will be positioned to more effectively evaluate policy interventions to improve contraception provision, with the ultimate aim of reducing sexual and reproductive health inequalities experienced by vulnerable subgroups across BC. Through CART partnerships, there is excellent potential for effective scaling up of the CART-CCM tools within the health system to monitor and evaluate investments made in this area not only in BC, but across Canada.