A patient’s prescription to heal healthcare: team-based care

Around this time last year, the Government of Canada's Sectoral Workforce Solutions Program, administered by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), funded an initiative called Team Primary Care (TPC).

The initiative, hosted at the Foundation for Advancing Family Medicine, is co-led by Dr. Ivy Oandasan from the College of Family Physicians of Canada and Dr. Ivy Bourgeault from the Canadian Health Workforce Network.

Their mission is clear: improve all patients’ access to care by facilitating the widespread adoption of a team-based model of primary care amongst all healthcare providers, regardless of profession.

With their funding from ESDC coming to an end, the TPC team hosted an end-of-grant summit in Ottawa on February 23, 2024, which convened over 65 health and educational organizations and hundreds of representatives of all health disciplines.

But more importantly, patients, like me, were invited too. Since 2017, I’ve shared my lived experience with chronic and acute illnesses—and living with an invisible disability—to provide insights to health and research bodies so they can improve the quality, safety and relevance of their services and research for patients, as well as build trust with the communities they serve.

Being a patient invited to fully participate in the TPC summit, I felt like my perspectives and contributions were genuinely valued, and on equal footing with all the other perspectives in the room.

It was truly inspiring to see an event that brought together a plethora of health leaders, and just listening to the discussions happening, I could tell there was great enthusiasm and appetite for increased collaboration amongst disciplines in the service of better health outcomes for patients.

Now, you may be asking: does team-based primary care really matter? Would it really make a difference?

To me, when considering the current health and human resource crises gripping every province and territory, it seems like a shift towards team-based primary care is the inevitable outcome. It is becoming increasingly recognized by both patients and healthcare professionals as a critical element for transforming healthcare into something more patient-centered, efficient, and effective in addressing the complex physical, spiritual and mental health needs of people in Canada.

The problem patients face with much of healthcare delivery is how fractured or isolating it can feel when receiving that care. Patients will often get the impression from healthcare providers that they become “someone else’s problem” when they are discharged from the hospital, referred out to a specialist from their family doctor (if they have one), or transferred from one provider to another.

As a patient, it feels like you have to start at square one each time you need to see the next healthcare provider, instead of travelling in a straight and seamless line where everyone is on the same page and knows your care plan. This makes the journey towards health and recovery so much more arduous and time consuming.

And let me be clear: I do not necessarily blame individual healthcare providers for giving patients this impression. Maybe it comes down to a communication issue, or perhaps they’re simply overwhelmed with too many patients to care for, with dwindling capacity and resources.

These are all symptoms of both health and education systems remaining rigid in how they train health professionals to care for their patients, and ignoring the fact that patients must interact with more than one provider on their road to better health.

The reality is that healthcare already happens in teams. But right now, those teams are fragmented, siloed, and not the best at talking to each other. For me, I consider every healthcare professional I interact with to be part of my team. But when individual providers inside a supposed team are disconnected from each other, unable to efficiently coordinate care, patients like me—and perhaps even you or your loved ones—are worse off for it. Some even fall through the cracks and get lost in the maze that is the healthcare system, and end up not receiving the care they need in a timely manner, thus putting them at increased risk of illness or death because of it.

To-date, TPC’s excellent work has culminated in the development of a Call to Action to request that all levels of government fund and invest in The Primary Care Vision for Canada: an integrated health care system in which everyonereceives quality, comprehensive primary care from a well-trained, well-supported, and optimally utilized care team. I personally signed TPC’s Call to Action, which has been gaining an impressive amount of signatures, and if improving healthcare in Canada is important to you, I’d encourage you to sign it too.

Maxime Lê is founder and principal of Lê & Co. Health Communication Santé, a bilingual health communications firm. He is a patient partner with The Ottawa Hospital and Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, serves on the Board of Directors of the Patient Advisors Network and co-chairs the Ontario Health East Patient and Family Advisory Council. In 2023, he joined the Equity in Health Systems Lab as a patient partner and investigator.