Author Description

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the devolution of health and social services to more local/regional levels. This report describes the activities and presents the findings of a task force formed in Ontario to address that very issue. The initial mandate of the task force was to implement demonstration projects to assess the actual impact of devolving decision making for health and social services. The task force found that it lacked support for those projects and thus revised its mandate to focus on establishing a workable definition of devolution and on developing an evaluation framework for use in assessing the impact of models of devolution. Task force activities included a review of devolved and decentralized models, an assessment of the degree of support toward devolution in Ontario, a workshop identifying the issues involved in establishing a funding envelope for a region and distributing that envelope within a region, and development of an evaluation framework to guide future research and evaluation of devolution efforts and effects.