Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Less than 1% of the population is seen in university based hospitals while most of the population seeking medical care are seen in a primary healthcare setting. Primary care (PC) fills a huge gap between the general healthy population and the university teaching hospital in provision of healthcare services. With standardized governance planning, sharing and access policies specific for biobanks, the roadblock to samples/ data have been lifted, leading to increased usage of specimens/data. Patients seeking medical care in a primary setting present with symptoms that do not always render towards diagnosis. However, having a biobank structure in PC is key in studying trends, susceptibilities to disease and obtaining population data. Furthermore, it can provide reliable assessment of lifestyle, environmental and genetic factors as determinants of chronic disease. However the challenges we face in a PC biobank in Quebec are of multiple facets. The first facet relates to the nature and organizational aspect such as patient sampling (population), governance and the type of collections (data and biospecimen) in a PC setting. The other facet relates to the current Canadian and provincial regulatory landscape around biobanks and its application in the context of PC.