Goals
- Pathways Community Services will be an enabler of high-quality patient care, complementing or providing alternatives to purely biomedical treatments, including a focus on the social determinants of health (ie. enabler of “social prescribing”).
- Consolidate a wide variety of services in one place, inside of the existing Pathways web platform users are already familiar with and using frequently.
- Facilitate navigation of the complex world of community services through robust search and filter functionality, allowing users to find the most appropriate services very quickly.
- Content is provided to Divisions without the added workload of data entry/maintenance, which instead will be provided by provincial staff.
Benefits to physicians
- Services can be found quickly, in the span of a patient visit, without having to flip through multiple other directories, and emailed directly to the patient from Pathways.
- Provides additional options in developing a treatment plan. For instance, for a patient struggling with depression, a physician could send examples of services that deal with social isolation before starting antidepressants.
- Pathways can point you in the right direction if you don’t know exactly what to search for – you can see all the services that exist in a category or narrow your search very specifically.
- See only services that are relevant to you – those that are available provincially and within the immediate surrounding municipalities. No more skimming through long lists to find the services that applies to you!
Benefits to patients
- Patients receive recommendations of relevant social services directly from their physician, which can then be explored further on their own on public facing Pathways.
- Significantly more robust search and filter capabilities than other online service directories, making Pathways Community Services extremely user friendly and quick to use.
- Returns only relevant results, allowing patients to narrow their search to very specific topic areas, and gives only service listings in their local community (or those that apply provincially).
- Patients can receive recommendations of relevant social services directly from their physician, which can be particularly meaningful.
Find out which Divisions have a public-facing Community Services Directory.