Grant: New Investigator Award-PA: Community-based Primary Health Care

The coordination and management of patients with chronic orthopedic (OA) pain often takes place at the primary care level. Primary care physicians play a key role in pain education, management and access to other specialties. Therefore, communication and teamwork among specialists working in academic health sciences centres and community physicians is critically important. Despite this, previous research has studied different professional groups separately. The proposed study will study these different perspectives at the same time using an ethnographic approach. Interviews will be conducted with primary care physicians who are involved in the care of patients with chronic OA pain. Interviews will also be done with those who work directly or indirectly with these primary care doctors, including the specialist physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, provincial agency representatives, patients and their family members. The results from this study will be shared with a diverse group of stakeholders and knowledge translation strategies will be devised, implemented and evaluated in order to improve care delivery across the province. This approach has the potential to both advance the science of knowledge translation research and improve clinical practice, with the ultimate goal of improving the health of patients and their families suffering from chronic pain.