Attributes of family physician encounters valued by older adults: a systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Older adults (aged ≥ 65) are frequent users of primary care services, often presenting with unique values, needs, expectations, and preferences for family physician encounters compared to patients of younger ages. This review identified and synthesized the attributes of family physician encounters that older patients prioritize, spanning the time of accessing primary care to post-visit. METHODS: We conducted a systematic search of three electronic databases (MEDLINE, Ovid Embase, Web of Science) to identify peer-reviewed research articles of any design. Seven reviewers screened and extracted information using a standardized template. We narratively synthesized findings across the included studies. Older adult patient partners provided strategic input throughout the key phases of this review, including developing the research question, literature screening and synthesis, and interpreting the findings to enhance relevance and applicability. RESULTS: We identified 28,461 articles for screening after duplicate removal. Title and abstract screening resulted in 463 retained articles, with 62 articles included for analysis after full-text screening. We identified six key attributes of family physician encounters that older adults value before, during, and after visits: trust in providers, feeling heard, effective information exchange, affective behaviours, continuity of care (longitudinal relationships), and foresight/future planning. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings synthesizing international evidence highlight which attributes matter most to older primary care patients as they age and increasingly access family physicians. These attributes can guide primary care planning, organization, and physician education/training to promote high-quality care for older adults. REGISTRATION: Our systematic review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024555970).
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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 | 0.074 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".