A key element in planning and supporting health workers is to understand the breadth of their professional practice. Data and research can improve our understanding of health professions and how they relate to one another, through overlapping practice scopes and interprofessional teamwork.
At the Health Workforce Canada Connects symposium, the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) led an action-oriented workshop focused on efforts to define and measure comprehensive family practice. Integrating multiple frameworks, past research, and broad data sources, the CFPC has developed a set of core metrics covering the scope of family physicians’ clinical care, primary care roles, professional activities, and practice contexts.
The workshop engaged participants in a discussion on the emergent set of metrics, assessing its relevance and robustness in measuring the scope of family practice. Workshop participants also discussed data sources that helped interpret the data trends that are now being visualized.
Key Insights
- The scope of what it means for family physicians to provide patients with comprehensive care is evolving rapidly, especially as we move toward team-based care.
- Given family physicians’ many contributions to healthcare, it is important to measure comprehensive family practice across broad clinical and situational contexts.
- In addition to measuring the scope of care, full-time equivalent (FTE) data helps evaluate the health systems’ capacity to meet population health needs. At present, there are multiple ways to measure FTE and no universally accepted standard definition.
- Quantitative and qualitative metrics are key to evaluating patient outcomes and provider experiences related to comprehensive family practice and team-based care.
Key Actions
- Future efforts to measure comprehensive family practice should take full advantage of existing data sources, including those of the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC), CIHI, Statistics Canada, and other datasets that do not require new primary data collection.
- CFPC frameworks can serve as a resource to develop new data and metrics for family practice and primary care. This can help to make measurement more standardized and facilitate comparison.
- Data development and analysis should be advanced in ways that support family doctors in their efforts to provide needed and effective care for patients and communities.