Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases in childhood. To prevent unwanted emergency room visits and hospital admissions, children should be seeing their primary care doctor (family physician or pediatrician) continuously and consistently to ensure proper use of medication to control symptoms and to teach the children and their families when to seek medical care in the case of an incident. In Quebec, children can be registered for primary care (PC) by family physicians, some of whom work in family medicine groups (FMGs). FMGs were created in 2002 to improve medical care, including longitudinal continuity of care. Longitudinal continuity is a measure of the frequency of the interactions of the patient with his/her healthcare provider. Few studies have looked at how having a primary care doctor and continuously seeing him or her (longitudinal continuity) can affect asthma care and outcomes in children. In order to address this important question, we will first take data from the Régie de l'assurance maladie du Québec to look at all the kids in Quebec from 2-16 years old. We will see if having a primary care provider (Family Medicine Group, non-Family Medicine Group, Pediatrician) results in less emergency visits and hospitalizations for asthma. We will see if these results change if the child sees the primary care provider consistently and continuously (such as seeing the primary care doctor monthly) versus seeing the primary care provider not consistently. We think that having a primary care provider, and specifically a more continuous, consistent relationship, will result in less emergency visits and hospital admissions. This study will be important to help improve primary care and asthma care services for children in Quebec.