Cross Provincial Comparison of Programs for Patients with Multimorbiditiy in Interprofessional Collaborative Family Practice Teams in Primary Health

More and more Canadian adults are living with more than one chronic diseases or conditions at the same time, especially as they get older. This creates complex health and social challenges that can be helped by a team of interprofessional primary healthcare providers. We will identify and compare the programs being offered for patients with these conditions in primary healthcare teams in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) and Nova Scotia (NS). We will examine the effective elements of these programs using a framework for patient-centered care developed by researchers in Quebec (QC) and Ontario (ON). Our first step will be to identify the various programs for patients with multiple chronic conditions being offered by primary healthcare teams in NL and NS. We will interview team members and patients from these programs to map the process of care for patients. We will also do a survey of patients with multiple chronic conditions to understand their experience of receiving care from these teams. We will compare results across provinces. We will hold a meeting of the teams from all four provinces to share knowledge and develop tools that could be used by primary healthcare teams, patients, healthcare administrators and researchers. We expect that we will identify program enhancements that could lead to improvements in quality of care for patients with multiple chronic conditions. This could enable these patients to experience better health and require less emergency and hospital care.