Continuity of Care

Continuity of Care

The American Academy of Family Physicians defines continuity of care as “the process by which the patient and his/her physician-led care team are cooperatively involved in ongoing health care management toward the shared goal of high-quality, cost-effective medical care.” Haggerty et al. identified three types of continuity in every discipline: informational, management, and relational. Informa...

Looking back: continuity of care.

A few numbers Between 1996 and the present, there were increases in CFPC membership from 13 000 to 28 000; staff from 65 to 140; the annual operating budget from $10 million to $40 million; the number of first-year residents entering family medicine each year from 475 to 1300; the proportion of medical school graduates selecting family medicine as their first choice from a low of 23% in 2003 to...

Continuity of care versus speed of access.

improving and that communication is best learnt through observation in clinical situations. If the role models that medical students and junior doctors are observing are poor communicators how do we expect these learners to improve? I agree that observation and reflection is an important part of the experiential learning process, as is practising skills. But we know that in clinical situation l...

Continuity of care--going out of style?

Two new aspects of continuity of care.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether the original continuity of care framework is still applicable to family medicine today. DESIGN Qualitative descriptive study. SETTING Kingston, Ont. PARTICIPANTS Three groups of first-year family medicine residents (18 in total), 2 groups of family physicians in established comprehensive practices (9 in total), and 2 groups of family physicians working in ep...