Annals of Family Medicine: Person-Centered Primary Care Measure Shows Validity Across 35 Countries

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Nov. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A new study published in the November/December 2021 issue of Annals of Family Medicine provides evidence that the Person-Centered Primary Care Measure, a tool used to evaluate patients' primary care experiences, can reliably gather, and assess data across different cultural contexts.

According to the study, the PCPCM enables data collection with high comparability, despite differences in geography, culture, or language.

Authors of the study, "Measuring Primary Care Across 35 OECD Countries," include Stephen J. Zyzanski, PhD; Martha M. Gonzalez, BA; Jonathan P. O'Neal, BS; Rebecca S. Etz, PhD; Sara R. Reeves, FNP-C, MBA; and Kurt C. Stange, MD, PhD.

"We aim to make the PCPCM available for use across diverse languages and countries, and to stimulate preliminary hypotheses about inter-country differences that can be examined in future research to guide policy and practice based on the natural experiment of different countries' approaches to health care," they write.

Developed in 2017, the PCPCM contains 11 questions (plus an optional question) that focus on the patient's access to care, their relationship with their physician and their ability to reach health outcome goals. It also focuses on integrating, personalizing, and prioritizing care, among other aspects. Responses to these questions provide physicians and researchers with insight into outcomes associated with better health, equity, quality, and sustainable health care expenditures.

In 2019, researchers administered the PCPCM in 28 languages to 360 adults in each of the 35 participating countries. The team also assessed the PCPCM's validity by looking at demographics and examining the number of years a survey participant had been with their primary care physician and practice.

"The solid reliability and validity of the PCPCM across different languages and countries, and the variability of responses across countries, call for further ecological and individual research," the authors concluded, noting that the measure can be used to learn from the different approaches to health care across the participating countries.

Measuring Primary Care Across 35 OECD Countries
Rebecca S. Etz, PhD, et al.
Larry A. Green Center for the Advancement of Primary Health Care for the Public Good, Department of Family Medicine and Population Health, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia

SOURCE Annals of Family Medicine

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