OECD Patient-Reported Indicators Survey (PaRIS) in Canada: Results From the National Field Study

Context: The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development provides international standards for reporting on health system performance. While collecting and reporting patients’ experiences and outcomes is increasingly integrated into acute care, most healthcare services are provided in primary care. It is a significant gap that patient-reported measurement still needs to be improved in primary care.

Objective: Compare, in Canada, nationally equivalent health outcomes and experiences of patients with chronic conditions treated in primary care to identify areas of excellence and improvement.

Study Design and Analysis PaRIS-Survey in Canada is a two-phase cross-sectional study (pilot and main study).

Setting or Dataset: Primary care practices across Canada.

Population Studied: Inclusion criteria for providers are: a) practicing providers (e.g., family physicians, nurse practitioners) who have a patient panel. Inclusion criteria for patients are: a) aged 45 years or older; and b) having at least one registered contact with a recruited provider during the six months preceding the selection procedure.

Intervention/Instrument: The patient and provider questionnaires were developed based on the framework of the PaRIS-OECD survey and approved by the Working party-PaRIS.

Outcome Measures: The provider questionnaire asks about practice characteristics (34 items). The Main Patient Survey consists of 121 items and is organized around four domains: health status, symptoms, managing health, experiences of primary health care services, experiences of other health care services, and sociodemographic characteristics.

Results: Phase 1. The pilot study included six provinces. 816 patients and 23 PCPs from 19 practices in 3 provinces (SK, ON, NB) participated. Patient response rates were 10% (SK), 28% (ON), and 47% (NB). No data were collected in BC, QC, and PEI. Several issues were raised during the pilot for participants’ recruitment, such as insufficient resources, and accessibility to the web-based survey. Phase 2. Data will be collected during the summer and fall of 2023. The results of data collection will be presented.

Conclusions: Results from this unique Canadian multiphase study will provide a new generation of standardized patient-reported indicators used across 20 countries. These results will enable countries to learn from the approaches of others to improve the performance of primary care services for people living with chronic conditions.