Storylines of family medicine I: framing family medicine - history, values and perspectives.

Storylines of Family Medicine is a 12-part series of thematically linked mini-essays with accompanying illustrations that explore the many dimensions of family medicine, as interpreted by individual family physicians and medical educators in the USA and elsewhere around the world. In 'I: framing family medicine-history, values, and perspectives', the authors address the following themes: 'Notes on Storylines of Family Medicine', 'Family medicine-the generalist specialty', 'Family medicine's achievements-a glass half full assessment', 'Family medicine's next 50 years-toward filling our glasses', 'Four enduring truths of family medicine', 'Names matter', 'Family medicine at its core' and 'The ecology of medical care.' May readers find much food for thought in these essays.

Is primary care ready for a potential new public health emergency in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, now subsided?

INTRODUCTION: The lingering burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on primary care clinicians and practices poses a public health emergency for the United States. This study uses clinician-reported data to examine changes in primary care demand and capacity. METHODS: From March 2020 to March 2022, 36 electronic surveys were fielded among primary care clinicians responding to survey invitations as posted on listservs and identified through social media and crowd sourcing. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on both closed- and open-ended survey questions. RESULTS: An average of 937 respondents per survey represented family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, geriatrics, and other specialties. Responses reported increases in patient health burden, including worsening chronic care management and increasing volume and complexity. A higher frequency of dental- and eyesight-related issues was noted by respondents, as was a substantial increase in mental or emotional health needs. Respondents also noted increased demand, "record high" wait times, and struggles to keep up with patient needs and the higher volume of patient questions. Frequent qualitative statements highlighted the mismatch of patient needs with practice capacity. Staffing shortages and the inability to fill open clinical positions impaired clinicians' ability to meet patient needs and a substantial proportion of respondents indicated an intention to leave the profession or knew someone who had. CONCLUSION: These data signal an urgent need to take action to support the ability of primary care to meet ongoing patient and population health care needs.

Primary Care Research: Looking Back and Moving Forward With Reflections on NAPCRG's First 50 Years.

NAPCRG celebrated 50 years of leadership and service at its 2022 meeting. A varied team of primary care investigators, clinicians, learners, patients, and community members reflected on the organization's past, present, and future. Started in 1972 by a small group of general practice researchers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, NAPCRG has evolved into an international, interprofessional, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational group devoted to improving health and health care through primary care research. NAPCRG provides a nurturing home to researchers and teams working in partnership with individuals, families, and communities. The organization builds upon enduring values to create partnerships, advance research methods, and nurture a community of contributors. NAPCRG has made foundational contributions, including identifying the need for primary care research to inform primary care practice, practice-based research networks, qualitative and mixed-methods research, community-based participatory research, patient safety, practice transformation, and partnerships with patients and communities. Landmark documents have helped define classification systems for primary care, responsible research with communities, the central role of primary care in health care systems, opportunities to revitalize generalist practice, and shared strategies to build the future of family medicine. The future of health and health care depends upon strengthening primary care and primary care research with stronger support, infrastructure, training, and workforce. New technologies offer opportunities to advance research, enhance care, and improve outcomes. Stronger partnerships can empower primary care research with patients and communities and increase commitments to diversity and quality care for all. NAPCRG offers a home for all partners in this work.

Optimizing Survey Response Rates in Graduate Medical Education Research Studies.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Survey response rates of 70% or higher are needed if findings are to be considered generalizable. Unfortunately, survey studies of health professionals have declining response rates. We have conducted survey research with residents and residency directors for over 13 years. Here we describe the strategies we used to obtain optimal response rates in residency training research collaboratives. METHODS: We administered over 6,000 surveys between 2007 and 2019 to evaluate the Preparing the Personal Physician for Practice and Length of Training Pilot studies, both of which involved redesigning residency training. Survey recipients included program directors, clinic managers, residents, graduates, as well as supervising physicians and clinic staff members. We logged and analyzed survey administration efforts and approaches to optimize strategies. RESULTS: Overall, we obtained response rates of 100% for program director surveys, 98% for resident surveys, 97% for continuity clinic surveys, 81% for graduates surveys, and 48% for the supervising physician and 43% for the clinic staff. Response rates were highest when the relationships between the evaluation team and survey recipients were closest. Strategies for optimizing response rates included (1) building relationships with all participants whenever possible, (2) sensitivity to survey timing and fatigue, and (3) using creative and persistent follow-up measures to encourage survey completion. CONCLUSION: High response rates are achievable, though they require an investment in time, resources, and ingenuity in connecting with study populations. Investigators conducting survey research must consider administrative efforts needed to achieve target response rates, including planning for funds accordingly.

The Time Is Now: A Plan to Redesign Family Medicine Residency Education.

A new graduate medical education program in family medicine is urgently needed now. We propose an innovative plan to develop community-based, community-owned family medicine residency programs. The plan is founded on five guiding principles in which residencies will (1) transition to independent, community-owned organizations; (2) sustain comprehensiveness and generalism; (3) emphasize collaborative learning and interprofessional education; (4) develop local educators with national guidance; and (5) share resources, responsibilities, and learning. We describe actionable steps to begin the process of transforming residencies and strengthening primary care. As community-based and locally-run organizations, residencies will gain self-determination in how time is allocated, budgets are spent, and teams function. Building on the momentum of the National Academy of Medicine's 2021 primary care implementation plan and recommendations by family medicine organization leaders, we propose a Decade of Family Medicine Residency Transformation. We encourage individuals and organizations spanning disciplines, health care systems, and communities, to join forces to reimagine and recreate the preparation of outstanding personal physicians dedicated to individual and community health and well-being.

Something Republicans and Democrats can agree on: Support for integrated behavioral health.

Barriers to the spread of integrated behavioral health and primary care continue to limit progress on meeting critical needs for mental health and substance use disorder services. The recent Bipartisan Policy Center Report (2021) provides key policy recommendations to address these barriers and accelerate the adoption of integrated behavioral health in Medicaid and Medicare. Having bipartisan support presents a policy window of opportunity to advance integrated behavioral health through advocacy for implementation of these recommendations, parallel changes to occur in employer-based and other commercial insurance plans, and development of operationalized standards for core service delivery elements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Shared Language for Shared Work in Population Health.

People working on behalf of population health, community health, or public health often experience confusion or ambiguity in the meaning of these and other common terms-the similarities and differences and how they bear on the tasks and division of labor for care delivery and public health. Shared language must be clear enough to help, not hinder people working together as they ultimately come to mutual understanding of roles, responsibilities, and actions in their joint work. Based on an iterative lexicon development process, the authors developed and propose a definitional framework as an aid to navigating among related population and community health terms. These terms are defined, similarities and differences clarified, and then organized into 3 categories that reflect goals, realities, and ways to get the job done. Goals include (a) health as well-being for persons, (b) population health as that goal expressed in measurable terms for groups, and (c) community health as population health for particular communities of interest, geography, or other defining characteristic-groups with shared identity and particular systemic influences on health. Realities are social determinants as influences, health disparities as effects, and health equity as both a goal and a design principle. Ways to get the job done include health care delivery systems for enrollees and public health in population-based civic activities-with a broad zone of collaboration where streams of effort converge in partnership with served communities. This map of terms can enable people to move forward together in a broad zone of collaboration for health with less confusion, ambiguity, and conflict.

UPSTREAM! Together evaluation results from community efforts to prevent mental, emotional, and behavioral health problems.

Mental, emotional, and behavioral (MEB) health problems are prevalent globally. Despite effective programs that can prevent MEB problems and promote mental health, there has not been widespread adoption. UPSTREAM! Together was a planning project in three Colorado communities. Communities partnered with academic and policy entities to 1) translate evidence about MEB problem prevention into locally-relevant messages and materials and 2) develop long-term plans for broad implementation of interventions to prevent high-priority MEB problems. Community members recognized the need to talk about MEB problems to prevent them. The UPSTREAM! communities localized messages designed to start conversations and sustain attention on preventing MEB problems. The communities understood that prevention takes sustained community attention and advocacy, knowing that important outcomes may be years away. Long-term implementation plans aimed to strengthen families and enhance social connections among youth. Despite community readiness and capacity to implement evidence-based programs, there were few funding opportunities, delaying program implementation and revealing gaps between funding policies and community readiness. This community-engaged experience suggests an achievable approach, acceptable to communities, and worthy of further development and testing. Policies that cultivate and support local expertise may help to increase wider community adoption of evidence-based programs that promote mental health among youth.

Retrieving Family Medicine's Lost Literature: The Journal of Family Practice 1974-1999 Archive.

The first repository of research in family medicine in the United States was the Journal of Family Practice (JFP) (https://www.mdedge.com/familymedicine). Much of the original development, debates about family medicine and primary care, and subsequent discoveries reside in JFP issues from 1974 to 1999. An archive of these issues is now available online after being somewhat lost for several years. It is a treasure-trove of information that reveals the evolution of family medicine as a discipline and remains pertinent to the current challenges and aspiration of family medicine and primary care. Investigators can benefit from checking this archive to build from prior work and avoid unnecessarily starting over.

Heeding the Call for Urgent Primary Care Payment Reform: What Do We Know about How to Get Started?

The COVID-19 pandemic has added further urgency to the need for primary care payment reform. Fee-for-service payments limit the flexibility of practices to respond to crises and leave practices without sufficient revenues when visit volumes decrease. Historic fee-for-service payments have been inadequate, and prior implementations of prospective payments have encountered challenges; there is a need to bring forward the best available evidence on how to design prospective payments for payers and policymakers. Evidence suggests setting primary care investment at 10% to 12% of the total cost of care, approximately translating to an average $85 per member per month, with significant variation based on age and adjustment for medical and social measures of risk. Enhanced investment in primary care should be aligned across payers and support practice transformation to advanced models of care.

Uniting Public Health and Primary Care for Healthy Communities in the COVID-19 Era and Beyond.

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has laid bare the dis-integrated health care system in the United States. Decades of inattention and dwindling support for public health, coupled with declining access to primary care medical services have left many vulnerable communities without adequate COVID-19 response and recovery capacity. "Health is a Community Affair" is a 1966 effort to build and deploy local communities of solution that align public health, primary care, and community organizations to identify health care problem sheds, and activate local asset sheds. After decades of independent effort, the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to reunite and align the shared goals of public health and primary care. Imagine how different things might look if we had widely implemented the recommendations from the 1966 report? The ideas and concepts laid out in "Health is a Community Affair" still offer a COVID-19 response and recovery approach. By bringing public health and primary care together in community now, a future that includes a shared vision and combined effort may emerge.

Colorado's continuing journey to integrated care: Progress!

This commentary discusses the journey to integrated behavioral health and primary care in the state of Colorado. The authors discuss integrated care, and the lessons learned by early adopters can help those just getting started. They argue integration is possible in practice settings of all types despite the barriers that exist - but these barriers must continue to be broken down for further scaling and long-term sustainability. While adequate payment, workforce, and data-sharing infrastructure and policy are necessary for scaling and sustainability, they are not sufficient: practice transformation support is crucial for a change this fundamental. Finally, scaling and sustaining integration takes a village; diverse stakeholders across sectors, including payers, clinicians, patients, public health, philanthropy, and policymakers, all have a role to play. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Conditions Influencing Collaboration Among the Primary Care Disciplines as They Prepare the Future Primary Care Physician Workforce.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Much can be gained by the three primary care disciplines collaborating on efforts to transform residency training toward interprofessional collaborative practice. We describe findings from a study designed to align primary care disciplines toward implementing interprofessional education. METHODS: In this mixed methods study, we included faculty, residents and other interprofessional learners in family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics from nine institutions across the United States. We administered a web-based survey in April/May of 2018 and used qualitative analyses of field notes to study resident exposure to team-based care during training, estimates of career choice in programs that are innovating, and supportive and challenging conditions that influence collaboration among the three disciplines. Complete data capture was attained for 96.3% of participants. RESULTS: Among family medicine resident graduates, an estimated 87.1% chose to go into primary care compared to 12.4% of internal medicine, and 36.5% of pediatric resident graduates. Qualitative themes found to positively influence cross-disciplinary collaboration included relationship development, communication of shared goals, alignment with health system/other institutional initiatives, and professional identity as primary care physicians. Challenges included expressed concerns by participants that by working together, the disciplines would experience a loss of identity and would be indistinguishable from one another. Another qualitative finding was that overwhelming stressors plague primary care training programs in the current health care climate-a great concern. These include competing demands, disruptive transitions, and lack of resources. CONCLUSIONS: Uniting the primary care disciplines toward educational and clinical transformation toward interprofessional collaborative practice is challenging to accomplish.