Data access has been granted for the British Columbia component of a multi-province project to explore factors shaping primary healthcare system capacity (including recent policy changes) over time, and to develop planning tools to estimate future needs and capacity.
“There are more family doctors and nurse practitioners per person than ever before in Canada, but primary care access is falling, inequities are widening, and clinicians report stress and overwork,” according to Linsday Hedden, Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University, the Principal Investigator for the British Columbia part of the project.
The Canada-wide research team believe that several factors may explain the gap between primary care need and system capacity — population aging, increasing clinical complexity, and increasing service intensity for example. Falling practice volumes, increasing administrative workload, changing patient and clinician demographics, and new health system roles (e.g. hospitalist and focused practices) may also shape system capacity. Policy changes, including new models of physician payment and shifts to virtual care provision, may also be impacting service supply and shaping system capacity more broadly. “Existing workforce planning tools consider population demographics, but not these other potentially important factors,” says Professor Hedden.
The study will determine impacts of changing family physician payment models on service supply and related outcomes and determine impacts of episodic virtual care on service supply and related outcomes. Finally, the team will develop models to estimate and compare future primary care needs and capacity under a range of policy-relevant scenarios.
The study will build on previous cross-provincial analysis by the team which generated comparable and linked administrative data sets in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Administrative data will be linked and analysed to track factors shaping primary care need and capacity over a 20 year period from 2004/5 to 2024/5.
Seven data sets from the BC Ministry of Health will be linked to provincial regulatory college data and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada data for the analysis.
The project, funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Grant, used Health Data Research Network Canada’s (HDRN’s) Data Access Support Hub (DASH), designed to streamline and expedite pan-Canadian, multi-jurisdictional research.
