Overview

Abstract (English)

Primary health care reform has become an area of priority in health policy with a strong importance placed on interdisciplinary teams of health care professionals. Quebec’s model, the groupes de médicine de famille (GMFs), were introduced late in 2002 emphasizing team-centered approaches to service delivery and aiming to improve access to primary health care, especially to improve after-hours access and to increase the number of Quebecers with a family doctor.A decade after their implementation, I investigated the impact of GMFs on various measures of access to primary health care and perceived remaining barriers. I emphasize potential access – i.e. measures that capture whether an individual has the ability to access needed health care including having a regular medical doctor.I used data from seven waves of the Canadian Community Health Survey to capture reported access to primary care and barriers to access. GMFs emerged at different rates in different health regions across Quebec allowing the construction of a GMF ‘participation’ measure using the share of primary care physicians practicing in GMFs in each health region and year. I employed a modified difference-in-difference analysis design that uses multivariate regression analysis to control for time trends in the outcomes, time-invariant differences between regions and individual-level covariates in an attempt to estimate the causal impact of GMF implementation on access to primary health care.I verified that pre-policy differences in terms of population and socioeconomic characteristics between regions with ultimately high vs. low rates of GMF participation are reasonable and remain fixed over time, making comparisons of these regions appropriate. Results suggest that rates of reported access have increased over time in most Quebec health regions. However, these measures of access vary across regions and some always report lower rates of access. Controlling for time trends, fixed differences between regions, and individual characteristics, reported access does not change significantly as GMF participation increases. Improved access to primary health care was one of the principal objectives of Quebec’s primary care reform a decade ago. My findings suggest that increased GMF participation has not improved several important measures of access, and that additional policy measures may be necessary to increase potential access to primary health care.

Abstract (French)

Please note that abstracts only appear in the language of the publication and might not have a translation.