Capacity and Access Measures in Primary Care Clinic Survey (CAMP-CS)

Context

Many people in British Columbia (BC) struggle to access primary care in their community. Recent estimates suggest that 1 in 6 British Columbians do not have access to a family physician. This is problematic, as research shows that access to comprehensive, community-based primary care can improve the health of populations and reduce overall costs to health care systems. Insufficient access to family doctors has persisted despite more and more family doctors graduating and starting to work in BC.

Goal

The Capacity & Access Measures in Primary Care (CAMP) project builds on previous work that examined the structure of primary care practices and described practice characteristics. CAMP evolved from this work with the intent to provide an accurate description of primary care organization at the clinic level.

Approach

CAMP focuses on the development and refinement of useful tools, such as short survey instruments, to provide the key elements for an accurate description of how primary care is currently organized, at the clinic level. These data elements are the building blocks for robust measures of:

  • CAPACITY – how many patients can be seen, by how many providers, in a typical week
  • ACCESS – how and when do patients receive care
  • COMPREHENSIVENESS – the “basket of services” that a patient can access at a clinic

Current Work

The CAMP Clinic Survey tool is currently being used to support primary care evaluation, including the development of an evaluation method for Community Health Centres. The CAMP Clinic Survey has also been used in pilots for clinics within Primary Care Networks. The current, broader aims for CAMP are:

  1. Refining the measures collected by the CAMP tools to meet current community needs by incorporating local expert, community and academic feedback.
  2. Making the CAMP tools available for clinic, community and researcher use.
  3. Studying the development and efficacy of the CAMP tools and sharing with wider academic community in publications and research presentations.

Licensing Information for CAMP Clinic Survey Use

The survey has been licensed under the following Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Creative Commons licensing. For more information about how this survey can be used, shared and distributed, please see the information about licensing here.

Resources