Primary health care—everything from visits to family physicians, consultations with nurse practitioners, calls to health information lines, and advice from pharmacists—is the foundation of Canada's health care system. Research suggests that improvements in primary health care are vital to securing the sustainability and accessibility of the entire health care system.

Between 2003 and 2006, the British Columbia Ministry of Health Services supported a multistage CHSPR research program to plan and build capacity in province-wide, system-level primary health care evaluation. Using data from the BC Linked Health Database and other data sources, the Centre has made immediate contributions to the province-wide measurement and evaluation of primary health care, and broken new ground by developing a logic model and methodology for measuring performance in primary health care renewal.

More recently, CHSPR researchers have been funded to develop and implement surveys of patient experiences with primary health care. In 2009, CHSPR researchers and the Ministry of Health Services collaborated to create a second atlas of primary health care in British Columbia, as a follow-up to the first primary health care atlas, published in 2005.

Projects