Revealing administrative staff roles in primary care during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study of family physicians’ perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Administrative staff in primary care undertake numerous tasks to support patient care delivery. Although their roles are often overlooked, administrative staff are essential to the coordination and operations of primary care clinics. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional clinical and administrative tasks, including transitioning to virtual appointments and triaging patients for urgency, changing typical workflows. In Canada, existing pandemic plans for primary care did not account for these administrative tasks, nor the support that family physicians would require to continue to provide patient access to primary care. This research seeks to describe and understand the perceptions and experiences of family physicians of their administrative staff roles in primary care during the COVID-19 pandemic, to help inform future pandemic planning. Methods: = 68) across the four regions and thematically analysed the data. Results: We identified five salient themes in the data, including (1) applying public health guidelines, (2) educating patients on COVID-19 and COVID-19 services, (3) re-organizing patient visits, (4) maintaining adequate staffing, and (5) recognizing administrative staff contributions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, family physicians took on numerous additional roles to reduce the risk of transmission of the virus with the support of their administrative staff. Family physicians emphasized the challenges of maintaining adequate staffing, and the importance of administrative staff in enabling the provision of primary care. Conclusions: Existing pandemic plans do not account for increased administrative roles taken on by primary care administrative staff. Pandemic plans must include guidance for the roles taken on by primary care administrative staff, such as clinical tasks, as they will continue to play an important role in pandemic recovery. Supporting administrative staff would enhance primary care providers' ability to manage care during pandemics, facilitate resilience, and decrease provider and administrative burnout.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".