Implications of interprofessional primary care team characteristics for health services and patient health outcomes: A systematic review with narrative synthesis.

Interprofessional primary care (IPPC) teams are promoted as an alternative to single profession physician practices in primary care with focus on preventive care and chronic disease management. Characteristics of teams can have an impact on their performance. We synthesized quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods evidence addressing the design of IPPC teams.

Funding models and medical dominance in interdisciplinary primary care teams: qualitative evidence from three Canadian provinces.

Background: Primary care in Canada is the first point of entry for patients needing specialized services, the fundamental source of care for those living with chronic illness, and the main supplier of preventive services. Increased pressures on the system lead to changes such as an increased reliance on interdisciplinary teams, which are advocated to have numerous advantages. The functioning of teams largely depends on inter-professional relationships that can be supported or strained by the financial arrangements within teams.

Politics and Professions: Interdisciplinary Team Models and Their Implications for Health Equity in Ontario.

Ontario's efforts to reform primary care through interdisciplinary primary care teams are unprecedented in Canada. Since 2004, the provincial government has focused its reform efforts on three models: Family Health Teams (FHTs), Community Health Centres (CHCs), and Nurse Practitioner-led Clinics (NPLCs). These models vary by team structure, funding, and governance.

Funding and remuneration of interdisciplinary primary care teams in Canada: a conceptual framework and application.

Background: Reliance on interdisciplinary teams in the delivery of primary care is on the rise. Funding bodies strive to design financial environments that support collaboration between providers. At present, the design of financial arrangements has been fragmented and not based on evidence.

How best to structure interdisciplinary primary care teams: the study protocol for a systematic review with narrative framework synthesis.

Background: Western publicly funded health care systems increasingly rely on interdisciplinary teams to support primary care delivery and management of chronic conditions. This knowledge synthesis focuses on what is known in the academic and grey literature about optimal structural characteristics of teams. Its goal is to assess which factors contribute to the effective functioning of interdisciplinary primary care teams and improved health system outcomes, with specific focus on (i) team structure contribution to team process, (ii) team process contribution to primary care goals, and (iii) team structure contribution to primary care goals.

Representations of OxyContin in North American newspapers and medical journals.

Background: There are public concerns regarding OxyContin (Purdue Pharma, Canada) and charges within the pain medicine community that media coverage of the drug has been biased.

Objective: To analyze and compare representations of OxyContin in medical journals and North American newspapers in an attempt to shed light on how each contributes to the 'social problem' associated with OxyContin.

Methods: Using searches of newspaper and medical literature databases, two samples were drawn: 924 stories published between 1995 and 2005 in 27 North American newspapers, and 197 articles published between 1995 and 2007 in 33 medical journals in the fields of addiction/substance abuse, pain/anesthesiology and general/internal medicine.

Pharmacist's identity development within multidisciplinary primary health care teams in Ontario; qualitative results from the IMPACT project.

Background: Multidisciplinary team development generates changes in roles, responsibilities, and identities of individual health care providers. The Integrating Family Medicine and Pharmacy to Advance Primary Care Therapeutics (IMPACT) project introduced pharmacists into family practice teams across Ontario, Canada, to provide medication assessments, drug information, and academic detailing and to develop office system enhancements to improve drug therapy.

Objective: To analyze pharmacists' narrative accounts during early integration to study identity development within emerging team-based care.

Integrating pharmacists into family practice teams: physicians' perspectives on collaborative care.

Objective: To explore family physicians' perspectives on collaborative practice 12 months after pharmacists were integrated into their family practices.

Design: Qualitative design using focus groups followed by semistructured interviews.

Setting: Seven physician-led group family practices in urban, suburban, and semirural Ontario communities.

Narrative reports to monitor and evaluate the integration of pharmacists into family practice settings.

Purpose: Narratives can capture unfolding events and negotiation of roles and thus can help to evaluate interventions in interdisciplinary health care teams. We describe a practical qualitative method, the narrative report, and its role in evaluating implementation research.

Methods: We used narrative reports as a means to evaluate an intervention to integrate pharmacists into group family practices.

The essence of telehealth readiness in rural communities: an organizational perspective.

This paper examines telehealth readiness from an organizational perspective and explores the essence of telehealth readiness among four domains, namely, patients, practitioners, the public, and organizations in rural Canadian communities. Because readiness is a necessary requirement for the successful implementation of an innovation, it is important to identify and ensure core factors of readiness before costly investments are made. The findings presented here derive from a qualitative phenomenological research approach involving semistructured telephone interviews with four key informants (respondents).

A readiness model for telehealth is it possible to pre-determine how prepared communities are to implement telehealth?

Telehealth "readiness" can be defined as the degree to which users, health care organizations, and the health system itself are prepared to participate and succeed in its application. This project developed a readiness model for rural/remote locations in Canada. Specifically defined groups or communities with shared characteristics within a rural geographical community (i.

A study of a rural community's readiness for telehealth.

A qualitative approach was used to explore the readiness of a rural community for the implementation of telehealth services. There were four domains of interest: patient, practitioner, public and organization. Sixteen semistructured telephone interviews (three to five in each domain) were carried out with key informants and recorded on audio-tape.