Understanding the Roles of Physiotherapists Within Ontario Primary Health Care Teams: A Mixed Methods Inquiry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A mixed methods program of research was undertaken in order to better understand the roles of physiotherapists within Ontario primary health care (PHC) teams. A profile of Ontario PHC teams (Family Health Teams and Community Health Centres) was generated to determine the complement of providers and provision of health programming within each PHC team. This first study provided an important contextual backdrop as well as a means to purposefully sample participants for the two following studies. The second study used qualitative descriptive method to explore the perceptions of family physicians and nurse practitioners related to the inclusion of physiotherapists (PTs) within Ontario PHC teams. The final study used grounded theory method to generate an explanatory scheme to explicate how PTs currently working within Ontario PHC team enact practice. Overall, Family Health Teams (FHTs) and Community Health Centres (CHCs) were characterized by diverse teams and both models offered health programming. Physiotherapists were integrated into these teams to a limited degree however, particularly within FHTs. Perceptions of family physicians and nurse practitioners unanimously described the benefit of including PTs within PHC teams, particularly in the areas of musculoskeletal health and chronic disease management. Finally, PTs within PHC teams were found to enact five inter-related roles: manager, evaluator, collaborator, educator and advocate. The enactment of these roles were found to be impacted by three contexts: interprofessional team, community and population served, and organizational structure and funding. Overall, the findings support the inclusion of PTs within Ontario PHC teams. In addition to describing the areas of practice and specific roles relative to PTs contribution within Ontario PHC teams, this inquiry also explained how PTs enacted these roles. Further, this program of research articulated how the three above noted contexts impact how PTs practice in order to fulfill Ontario’s PHC mandate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".