Transdisciplinary understandings and training on research: successfully building research capacity in primary health care.

There are many pathways to engaging in building primary health care (PHC) research capacity. These include students’ and residents’ projects, mentorship from colleagues engaged in research, and master’s and doctoral education. However, there are few graduate programs in Canada specifically in PHC research. An exemplary, one-of-a-kind tool for PHC research capacity building is Transdisciplinary Understandings and Training on Research–Primary Health Care (TUTORPHC), a national, interuniversity PHC research training program that has existed since 2003.1,2 The goal of TUTOR-PHC is to train a cadre of PHC researchers who are able and ready to tackle current and future challenges in PHC and to lead collaborative interdisciplinary PHC research. The TUTOR-PHC approach to achieving this is unique: it provides supplemental, transdisciplinary training in PHC research for individuals who are in other graduate programs (such as family medicine, nursing, epidemiology, psychology, social work, and other disciplines) or who are practising, midcareer health professionals. The TUTOR-PHC program has enacted interdisciplinary research training that aspires to engender a transdisciplinary skill set in its trainees.3 To our knowledge, there is no comparable research training program in PHC in the world.