Pathways Community Services Directory

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.