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With the advancement and development of the family doctor system, family doctor teams have become a main provider of primary health services, which has raised new requirements for the evaluation of their services. We comprehensively reviewed recent developments in evaluation tools for family doctor teams: examples from the UK, the US, European countries, Australia and Canada have shown that traditional evaluation tools based on the structure-process-outcome model are being replaced by some models that focus more on the team's organizational environment, internal relationships, psychological state and continuous improvement. In China, the development of assessment tools for family doctor teams has been initiated recently, with major manifestations of various research approaches but lack of high-quality theoretical models, and high-quality reliability and validity tests. Moreover, the assessment tools are lack of diverse domains, and indicators for assessing team relationships, emotions and psychology as well as continuous improvement. On the basis of international experience, we recommend using the input-mediator-output-input model as a theoretical basis to develop highly applicable tools for assessing family doctor services in China.

BackgroundImproving the effectiveness of a family doctor team, the main provider of primary healthcare, is an important means to enhance the effectiveness of community health services. The evaluation of team effectiveness has gained increasing attention.ObjectiveTo classify and summarize the assessment indicators and analyze the core dimensions of each indicator set regarding the effectiveness of a family doctor team using the input-mediator-output-input (IMOI) framework.MethodsStudies about the development of indictors for assessing the effectiveness of a family doctor team were systematically retrieved from databases of PubMed, CNKI, Wanfang Data and VIP from January 2000 to October 2020. Indicator mapping was used to classify and compare the indictors according to the structure of IMOI framework.ResultsFourteen studies were included, 4 of which were published abroad, and 10 in China. The indicators were classified using the IMOI framework: organizational environment, team building, and team member quality were classified as input (I) , team emergent state and team process were classified as mediator (M) ; service achievement and personal feedback were classified as output (O) , but no indicators were classified as input (I') .ConclusionThe qualities of theoretical models and research methods used for developing assessment indicators regarding the effectiveness of a family doctor team need to be improved. The assessment system developed based on the IMOI framework may be a good tool for evaluating team effectiveness, but the indicators need to be supplemented further.