Consistent use of the same primary care clinic (clinic continuity) | HQCA Focus

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Consistent use of the same primary care clinic (clinic continuity)

Proportion of all visits to a primary care clinic that are to the same clinic. (See data definition).

*Data courtesy of Alberta Health Services and Alberta Health. Please note: Results for the Borealis PCN are not currently available due to data quality issues caused when Saddle Hills and Peace Region PCNs merged to form the Borealis PCN.  The HQCA is working to get an updated dataset and will publish results from Borealis PCN as soon as possible.

What do you see?

  • Are there differences between zones or PCNs that are mainly urban (e.g., Calgary, Edmonton) compared to those that are mainly rural (e.g., North, Central, South)? What factors could account for this?
  • Is the percentage of patients who visit the same clinic for most of their visits increasing over time?
  • Are there differences between doctor continuity and clinic continuity? What could account for this?

Why is it meaningful?

  • Is there a relationship between this data and another healthcare area?
  • Do you see successes worth highlighting or opportunities for improvement?

Understanding clinic continuity

‘Clinic continuity’ is a term that refers to how consistently a patient visits the clinic where their primary care provider works. It is becoming more common for patients to be cared for by a group of family doctors and healthcare team members in the same clinic. The clinic that a patient visits most often to receive care becomes that patient’s ‘medical home’.

The benefits of consistently visiting the same clinic are similar to the benefits of consistently seeing the same family doctor: greater trust between the patient and their healthcare team, increased satisfaction of patient and care team members, and improved health outcomes for patients with chronic conditions that are managed in primary care.

  • ‘High’ continuity: clinic continuity is ‘high’ when a patient visits the same clinic for 80 per cent or more of their family doctor visits.
  • ‘Low’ continuity: clinic continuity is ‘low’ when less than 50 per cent of a patient’s clinic visits are to the same clinic.

Considerations when viewing the results

  • A goal of our primary care system is to increase the percentage of patient visits to one clinic.
  • The results do not include visits to the patient’s usual clinic when a family doctor is not seen. At the present time, other healthcare providers (e.g., nurse, pharmacist) cannot bill for a patient visit in a clinic.
  • The results do not include clinics (e.g., some ‘family care clinics’) without a doctor, where a team of healthcare providers (e.g., nurse practitioner, pharmacist, social worker) deliver health services to patients.

Alberta Quality Matrix for Health

The Health Quality Council of Alberta uses the Alberta Quality Matrix for Health as a way of organizing information and thinking around the complexity of the healthcare system. This measure can be used as input to assess primary healthcare’s performance in these dimensions of quality: Acceptability, Accessibility, Appropriateness, Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Safety.

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