Happy holidays from the BC Primary Health Care Research Network! It’s been a wonderful year connecting with all of you, whether over events or through research collaborations. Before we part for the break, we wanted to share our year in review, research progress, and upcoming events!
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In This Update
- Research Activity Updates
- Upcoming Events
- Recent Publications
- The Canadian Primary Care Research Network (CPCRN) Update
- About BC-PHCRN
Research Activity Updates
OECD Patient Reported Indicators Survey (PaRIS)
We are recruiting primary care practices for this exciting pan-Canadian and international initiative.
The OECD PaRIS is seeking to measure experience and outcomes of primary health care services. The goal of this work is to identify what matters most to patients, specifically those experiencing chronic conditions, when engaging with primary health care services to further inform a more patient-centred practice across Canada.
The PaRIS project includes two parts, a practice survey and a patient survey. The practice survey, completed by a clinician or their designate (someone who is knowledgeable about the practice), takes approximately 10-20 minutes to complete. The patient survey, which is distributed to 75 patients by the participating practice, will take 30-45 minutes to complete.
Participating primary care practices will receive a token of appreciation ($700) as well as a personalized report about their aggregated patient experiences, including the overall aggregated Canadian data. This offers each practice knowledge about patient experiences with their care and contributes to the quality of Canada’s healthcare system.
If you are a primary care practice interested in participating, please email the Research Coordinator, Lanting Cheng (lanting.cheng@ubc.ca) for eligibility and survey information. More information about this international survey can be found on the study website.
SPIDER (Structured Process Informed by Data, Evidence and Research) – A research and quality improvement collaboration supporting practices in improving care for complex older patients with polypharmacy
Recruitment of primary care practices for SPIDER is ongoing!
SPIDER is a pan-Canadian quality improvement project that focuses on the risk polypharmacy poses to older adults (aged 65 years and older on 10+ unique medications) and the corresponding impact it has on the health care system in Canada. The study uses a pragmatic cluster randomized controlled trial to assess the impact of SPIDER compared to usual care, in reducing potentially inappropriate prescriptions (PIPs). The BC-PHCRN is looking to recruit 14 practices and a proportion of their patients.
There is NO COST to you, and you will earn up to 16.5 MainPro+ credits.
If you are interested in participating, or to learn more about this study, please contact the Research Lead, Dr. Rubee Dev (rubee.dev@ubc.ca) or the Research Coordinator, Lanting Cheng (lanting.cheng@ubc.ca).
More information about this study can be found on the study website.
CanTreatCOVID
The Canadian Adaptive Platform Trial of Treatments for COVID in Community Settings (CanTreatCOVID) is evaluating the short- and long-term effectiveness of existing and new COVID-19 treatments for non-hospitalized patients using an adaptive platform trial study design. It will provide rapid evidence to guide clinical, health system, and public health decision making and planning.
The study is open to adults aged 19-49 years with one or more chronic condition(s) OR adults aged 50+ years, and who have tested positive for COVID-19 with symptoms starting within the last five days. All study activities are done remotely.
For further information, see: cantreatcovid.org
Upcoming Events
UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research (CHSPR) 36th Annual Health Policy Conference
Tuesday, March 5, 2024 | UBC Vancouver Campus | Hybrid
The 36th annual CHSPR health policy conference will explore the future of drug coverage in Canada at a time of potentially significant policy development. As millions of Canadians cannot afford their prescription drugs, the federal government is in the process of developing new legislation that will enable a more coordinated approach to pharmacare. The conference will survey the history and future of drug coverage, including vital topics such as equity in access to medicines, the history of reform efforts, and the emerging use of real-world evidence.
CHSPR’s long-standing conference promotes discussion between policy-makers, academics, providers, trainees, patients and national organizations on timely issues shaping health systems in Canada. The 2024 conference will bring together participants from diverse groups and from across the country, in-person and virtually! Register here: https://chspr.ubc.ca/conference/
Call for Abstracts
The conference organizing committee invites submissions of abstracts for poster presentations on health services and policy research topics. Deadline: January 8, 2024; 11:59 pm PST. Details: https://chspr.ubc.ca/conference/abstracts/
BC-PHCRN Primary Care Research Day
BC-PHCRN is hosting a Primary Care Research Day on March 4, 2024, where we’ll be exploring policy mechanisms to support high-quality primary care, collaborative learnings from primary care networks and team-based care.
Please watch the BC-PHCRN News and Events page for more information and outcomes from the event!
Recent Publications
Two new papers highlight research using data from the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network (CPCSSN).
Nathaniel Hawkins and colleagues explored the intersection of heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in terms of disease burden, healthcare utilization, and treatment with data from CPCSSN, finding that patients with either or both conditions are high utilizers of primary care, but the majority of visits relate to non-cardiorespiratory comorbidities.
Hawkins NM, Peterson S, Salimian S, Demers C, Keshavjee K, Virani SA, Mancini GBJ, Wong ST. Epidemiology and treatment of heart failure with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Canadian primary care. ESC Heart Failure. 2023.
A new paper authored by Rubee Dev and colleagues explores the link between sex and gender and metabolic disease using deidentified electronic medical record data from CPCSSN. Results indicate that the risk of developing metabolic syndrome is significantly less among females compared to males, and the paper concludes that targeting sex- and gender-specific risk factors could assist to reverse the occurrence of adverse cardiovascular outcomes associated with metabolic syndrome.
Dev R, Behlouli H, Parry M, Raparelli V, Norris CM, Pilote L. GOING-FWD Consortium. Impact of Sex and Gender on Metabolic Syndrome in Adults: A Retrospective Cohort Study from the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network. Can J Diabetes. 2023.
Other publications we’d like to highlight related to primary care:
Ghanbarian S, Wong GWK, Bunka M, Edwards L, Cressman S, Conte T, Price M, Schuetz C, Riches L, Landry G, Erickson D, McGrail K, Peterson S, Vijh R, Hoens AM, Austin J, Bryan S. Cost-effectiveness of pharmacogenomic-guided treatment for major depression. Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). 2023.
Grudniewicz A, Randall E, Lavergne MR, Marshall EG, Jones L, Rudoler D, Horrey K, Mathews M, McKay M, Mitra G, Scott I, Snadden D, Wong ST, Goldsmith LJ. Factors influencing practice choices of early-career family physicians in Canada: a qualitative interview study. Human Resources for Health. 2023.
The Canadian Primary Care Research Network (CPCRN) Update
Project leads and representatives of the CPCRN attended two conferences in November 2023 – the North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, USA, and Family Medicine Forum (FMF) in Montreal, CA. We welcome you to view the list of exciting presentations here!
In addition, we welcome you to join the newsletter mailing list and the LinkedIn group, to learn more about the CPCRN vision, as well as stay up to date with activities and vibrant conversations about primary care, patient-oriented research, policy happening across the network!
CPCRN Learning Series
Past: Indigenous Health Data Governance Toolkit
On Nov 28, 2023, Kimberly Fairman, Executive Director, Institute for Circumpolar Health Research and Shaneel Pathak, Patient Partner, Founder of Zamplo, a digital health social enterprise, presented on a toolkit that has been developed to support Indigenous leadership and communities in the area of health data governance and the collection and use of Indigenous health data. This emerged out of the desire of communities to develop and use their own health data, and the unique considerations of doing research in the North. Access the recording.
Upcoming: 2024 Learning Series – Creating shared solutions to common problems faced in primary care practice-based research and learning networks
This learning series seeks to create shared solutions to common problems like recruitment, privacy and confidentiality, data governance, data quality/fitness for purpose and how their outcomes can be used to learn from.
While more than one-third of all healthcare visits are made to primary care, much of the evidence primary care depends on is derived from research based in subspecialty care, hospital settings or single-disease cohorts. Primary care practice-based research and learning networks (PBRLNs), where research is conducted in practices, has famously turned our understanding of disease and treatment on its head regarding brown recluse bites, depression, upper respiratory infections, heart failure, unstable angina, and radiologic examinations of headaches, among many other topics, by studying the epidemiology of symptoms, conditions, and treatments in the settings where illness often first presents. Indeed PBRLNs have roots in community-based participatory research. Many PBRLNs include active engagement of community members and patients in the design, implementation, analysis, and dissemination of their research.
Session dates will be posted on the CPCRN and BC-PHCRN websites soon!
About BC-PHCRN
The BC Primary Health Care Research Network (BC-PHCRN) is a practice-based research and learning network, part of the Canadian Primary Care Research Network (CPCRN), designed to support evidence-informed transformation of the delivery of primary and integrated health care.
The goal of the BC-PHCRN is to encourage, facilitate, and support collaborations between government, health authorities, health professionals, patients and researchers in order to improve BC’s health care delivery system. The BC-PHCRN is an open network and welcomes individuals from all sectors involved in primary health care – researchers, patients, health care providers and policy makers.
The BC arm of the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network (CPCSSN) is housed within BC-PHCRN, where we specifically reach out and work with primary care clinicians (e.g., family physicians, nurse practitioners, etc.) to provide analytic support of electronic medical record data for purposes of practice quality improvement, disease surveillance and research.
Please share this update with colleagues who you think may be interested in our activities. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions. For more information about BC-PHCRN, please visit our website at https://spor-bcphcrn.ca/ or email info@spor-bcphcrn.ca.
BC Primary Health Care Research Network 