Contributing to Team Primary Care’s Vision
TPC Insights | By Ivy Bourgeault
In our first Communique Blog, Ivy Oandasan shared the path that helped crystalize the vision for Team Primary Care.
I became a part of that vision after Ivy invited me to be a co-chair. She had just concluded her tenure on an advisory committee that the Canadian Health Workforce Network (CHWN) team had established to create a microprogram in health workforce studies. The premise of the microprogram was that all everyone who works in health care should know what each other does. It was a long path to establish the microprogram.
When I first moved to uOttawa as the CIHR and Health Canada Research Chair in Health Human Resources, it was seemingly heady days for interprofessional initiatives on campus. The Academic Health Council was established in the region as an interprofessional partnership between the Faculties of Health Sciences, Medicine and the health sciences programs from La Cité Collégiale and Algonquin College. Around these tables I recall distinctly engaging with the Interprofessional Care: Blueprint for Action that Ivy spearheaded.
What was remarkable to me at the time was how little knowledge many practitioners had of the other practitioners within the system.
This caused me to think back to one of my first teaching assignments as a new professor at Western University. I taught a course called “Introduction to Health Occupations” and was frustrated by the lack of textbook materials for such a class, especially from a Canadian perspective. Did this have an impact on this lack of knowledge?
This previous experience and the insights garnered from my Academic Health Council experiences led first to the development of an online open access text – Introduction to the Health Workforce in Canada [translated into French] and to the respective course in the microprogram.
So what does this have to do with Team Primary Care?
I believe Ivy asked me on behalf of CHWN to be a co-lead on this project because of our deep knowledge and years of experience working with many different health care practitioner groups. I think Ivy was intrigued by what we were doing through the text and microprogram and how this knowledge transfer could be accelerated to teams and training programs through Team Primary Care.
The more academically oriented chapters in the text serve as a sort of foundation for the practitioner-focused reflections we have requested partners develop at the Interprofessional Collaborative Table that brings together the various training programs for different primary care practitioners. The micro credential Introduction to Health Occupations in Canada also forms the foundation for the micro credential we are developing focused on the different roles comprehensive primary care practitioners play – knowledge which we hope will catalyze change.
In addition, my work with a variety of health care practitioners has solidified my belief that a more diverse and inclusive health care workforce is a stronger one. As Team Primary Care supports dozens of projects, it has been heartening to see our partners commit to the principles of equity, diversity, inclusion and reconciliation. These overriding values are critical to providing quality care to each and every person in Canada.
Ivy’s vision to invite CHWN to Team Primary Care as a co-lead will help us to plant the seeds of knowledge through these and other means to enhance knowledge, trust and understanding for more effective team-based primary care.
It is a privilege to be a part of this vision.