Effects of primary care reform in Quebec on access to primary health care services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".