The Vision of Team Primary Care: Training for Transformation: The Journey Beginnings…
TPC Insights | By Ivy Oandasan
The story of this project really starts in the mid-2000s. As a family physician, educator and researcher, I saw a call for proposals by Health Canada for a literature review and environmental scan to study the evidence for Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient Centred Practice. As a family physician working in a team and training family medicine residents, I was intrigued. I applied for the funding and received it.
The incredible interdisciplinary team of researchers I brought together worked diligently for six months. We came up with an evolving Theoretical Framework for Advancing Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient Centred Practice. (Figure 1) and published an article on our findings (reference paper attached) Essentially, we recognized that there was enough emerging evidence to recommend to Health Canada that interprofessional education should be advanced to support health care professionals to practice interprofessional patient-centred care. But interprofessional competence would not be enough to guarantee that teamwork in healthcare would happen. Our framework highlighted the need for alignment between the education and practice systems with policy congruence informed by research.
Other initiatives emerged suggesting that interprofessional education had a chance to be scaled and spread. A National Expert Committee was convened with a five-year mandate to spearhead interprofessional education and interprofessional care. A number of interprofessional projects were funded by Health Canada. A sustainable Interprofessional association (CIHC) was launched. Offices and Centres of Interprofessional Educations across universities and colleges in Canada were created and the Accreditation for Interprofessional Health Professions Education (AIPHE) network was started that developed a guide to support the implementation of interprofessional education standards across profession-specific training programs.
I was excited to see that the federal government had also launched at that same time The Primary Care Transitions Fund (PHCT) to support primary care reform across Canada. What intrigued me was that these two initiatives IECPCP and the PHCT had no interaction. The advancement of interprofessional education for collaborative patient-centred practice did not penetrate the primary care sector. I wondered why.
Over 15 years later in February 2022, I received an email from Employment and Social Development Canada, with an invitation to apply for a special call for funding to support training within the Health Workforce Sector. With the primary care crisis looming, I had an “Aha moment.” What if we were able to use this funding to support training initiatives to prepare the Primary Care Workforce to work more interprofessionally to enable better access to care. What if we could devise a project that would bring together primary care providers to design and align both uni-and interprofessional learning as part of training? What if we could help support the creation of teams in primary care to work collaboratively using training interventions?
What might be possible if we could bring a community of the willing, committed to work to align primary care training with a common vision? How might principles of interprofessionalism, EDIA, truth and reconciliation and psychological health and safety support a collective social accountability goal to provide every Canadian with access to a primary care team?
What if we could build an evaluation plan to capture data describing what we learned as a community, the outcomes and outputs delivered, and the narrative of how team-based primary care training could influence the future state of primary care?
What if?
And Poof! The dream became a reality, and the story is in process! I can’t wait to see the ending of our chapter together. What will be our impact? What will others say we have accomplished? What will we catalyze from the work we are doing together? Stay tuned, share your experiences, and let us celebrate. We are doing incredible work. Thanks to all for your ongoing commitment!
Figure 1
References: D’Amour D. Oandasan I. Interprofessionality as the field of interprofessional practice and interprofessional education: An emerging concept. Journal of Interprofessional Care. May 2005 Supplement 1:8-20.