QUALICOPC (Quality and Costs of Primary Care) Canada : a focus on the aspects of primary care most highly rated by current patients of primary care practices

This Pan-Canadian report describes patient and physician perspectives regarding current performance of primary care in each province based on data collected as part of the Quality and Costs of Primary Care (QUALICOPC) study. The QUALICOPC study is an international study of quality and costs of primary care in 34 countries. This report describes results from the data collected in Canada. It includes only data collected from patients and physicians in primary care practices that provide comprehensive primary care. Two patient surveys were conducted as part of the study; one that asked patients about the importance of various aspects of primary care and the other about patients’ experiences with primary care. This report focuses on aspects of primary care that respondents to patient surveys (distributed during visits to primary care physicians) identified as very important aspects of their primary care experience. Primary care physicians from all Canadian provinces were asked to participate in the QUALICOPC study by a research team in each province. In general, one physician from each primary care practice was invited to participate (23 practices, primarily in Quebec, had more than one physician respondent). Physicians who agreed to participate were sent a package containing four different surveys regarding: the practice setting ; the services provided in the practice ; patient values and patient experience. In each practice, the physician was asked to complete the survey about the services provided and any staff member could complete the practice setting survey. One patient was expected to respond to the patient values survey and nine other patients were expected to respond to the patient experience survey. Physicians returned completed surveys to the research team in each province. A total of 8,332 patients of 810 primary care physicians in 785 practices across Canada responded to the surveys. A total of 1,160 completed the patient values survey and a different sampl