Keywords: Primary care, Patient reported indicators, Chronic conditions
Background:
Due to the growing elderly and chronically ill population in many countries, health care needs are changing.
Little is known about the capacity of health care system to meet these patients’ needs. Primary care plays a large role in addressing these needs, assessing its performance, including the patients perspective, is crucial.
As part of the Patient Reported Indicators Survey (PaRIS) initiative, the OECD surveys adults living with chronic conditions and the primary care they receive in 20 countries, including Belgium.
Research questions:
To what extent does the primary care patients with chronic conditions receive meet their needs?
Method:
PaRIS is a prospective cross-sectional international study that uses standardised data collection tools to survey patients and primary care provider (PCP) experiences.
The patient questionnaire (online or on paper) contains self-reported information about patient’s characteristics, health care experience and outcomes. The PCP questionnaire is about the practice’s structure and work organization.
Sampling is done in two steps; 1) recruitment of PCP and 2) recruitment of patients with (and without, as a reference group) chronic conditions, selected randomly within participating practices.
We target 100 participating PCP, 1000 will be invited with an expected participation rate of 10%. We aim to include 50 participating patients per practice, 170 patients per practice will be invited with an expected participation rate of 30%.
Results:
The survey will be conducted in 2023. Results will be available in 2024. Preliminary results of the field trial will be available near the end of 2022.
Conclusions:
The survey will provide perspectives from both patients and their health care providers and how they vary across and within countries. This will allow countries to benchmark their performances, exchange knowledge and increase cooperation.
Nationally, we hope to highlight groups of patients and health care aspects that require specific attention to further improve the quality of delivered care.
Points for discussion:
Participating PCP will receive a report with the aggregated results of their practice as an incentive.
PaRIS is a one-off data collection, to monitor the performance of the primary care, we have to repeat this data collection over time.
The results should not be attributed solely to the good/poor quality of care provided by the GP, but should be interpreted at the system level.