Changes in the roles of primary care administrative staff during COVID-19: Results from a cross-provincial qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Context: In primary care, administrative staff support several clinical processes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, primary care settings had to adopt numerous changes, such as prioritizing urgent patient appointments and implementing virtual care services. Although many of these tasks were supported by administrative staff, their roles are not accounted for in existing pandemic plans. Objective: To understand family physician (FP) perspectives on the roles of administrative staff in primary care settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study design and analysis: A qualitative, multiple case study was conducted. Relevant data, pertaining specifically to administrative staff, were analyzed thematically. Setting: Four Canadian jurisdictions (Vancouver Coastal Health region, British Columbia; Ontario Health West Region; the province of Nova Scotia; and Eastern Health region of Newfoundland and Labrador). Population studied: FPs practicing in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instrument: Semi-structured exploratory qualitative interviews. Outcome measures: Perspectives from FPs on the roles of administrative staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: We interviewed 68 FPs across the four provinces. Four themes were identified during the analysis regarding the roles assumed by administrative staff during the pandemic: 1) responding to the evolving public health emergency (e.g., keeping up with rapidly changing guidelines); 2) added responsibilities related to the pandemic tasks (e.g., screening patients for COVID-19 symptoms); 3) administrative staff resource impediments (e.g. administrative staff layoffs or time off due to care for dependents); and 4) the important role of administrative staff in enabling FPs to work at capacity. Conclusion: FPs emphasized that administrative staff took on vital roles in primary care during the COVID-19 pandemic. These roles should be explicitly included in future pandemic or emergency response plans, and considerations should be made about the training required to support administrative personnel in these roles. FPs should be supported to enable sufficient staffing during public health emergencies.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".