Grant: Team Grant: Strengthening the Health Workforce for System Transformation

Canadian primary care in in crisis. There are not enough family doctors for the population. Many Canadians struggle to access primary care or don't have a family doctor. As a result, all Canadian provinces are exploring ways to support the primary care workforce in order to improve access to and quality of primary care, including the introduction of team-based primary care (TBPC). TBPC is primary care delivered by teams of healthcare providers such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists and social workers, who work with their patients to provide comprehensive and coordinated care. Evidence shows that TBPC has the potential to enhance the quality of care, improve patient health and experiences, increase provider satisfaction with their work environment, and improve the overall value of care provided. Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) struggles with high rates of chronic disease and with providing care to a population that is spread out over a large geographical area, much of which is rural or remote. We also spend more on healthcare per person than any other province in the country. To address this, the NL Health Accord was established to create a 10-year plan to transform our health system. One of the ways they will do this is by introducing primary care teams across the province, called Family Care Teams (FCTs). The goal of this study is to inform the implementation, evaluation, and scale/spread of a team-based model of primary care (FCTs) in NL. We will do this using an approach that considers contextual factors, stakeholder input to articulate key components and mechanisms of the intervention. We will use that information to build evidence-based strategies to support implementation and a comprehensive evaluation framework. Finally, we will work with stakeholder to move the strategies and the evaluation framework into practice.