Primary Care for Individuals with Serious Mental Illness (PriSMI)

Even more than the general public, people living with serious mental illness also live with chronic health conditions like heart disease or diabetes. For this population, health care providers tend to ignore these other chronic health conditions and focus primarily on their mental illness. As a result, these other health conditions are often poorly managed, which leads to hospitalizations and death (not including suicide or accident) that could have been avoided. Our research looks to understand how primary care providers (e.g., family doctors, nurse practitioners) can better care for the physical health of people living with serious mental illness. We will focus on people who have been hospitalized due to a mental illness and who have a primary care provider in either Ontario or British Columbia. We will interview primary care providers as well as people living with serious mental illness who have experience with a hospitalization. These interviews will shed light on the experiences of getting help with preventing and treating chronic illnesses. Using large data sets, we will also look to understand the types of primary care services people with serious mental illness use and how these services might be different based on the type of primary care practice they go to (for example, doctors who work alone versus doctors who work with groups of professionals). Lastly, we plan to explore how recent policy changes (for example, Ontario Health Teams) may have impacted primary care service use and patterns for this population.