Measurement of Primary Healthcare Attributes from the Patient Perspective

摘要

This special issue of Healthcare Policy/Politiques de Santé presents a series of papers reporting on the concurrent validation of instruments that assess primary healthcare (PHC) delivery from the patient's perspective. The study was funded in 2004 by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) at the height of the Primary Health Care Transition Fund, an $8-million investment by Health Canada to catalyze a renewal of the PHC system in Canada. In planning the evaluation for initiatives, it became evident that program evaluators and researchers had little guidance for selecting among available instruments. For example, although various instruments purported to measure accessibility, it was not obvious that all measured the same underlying construct. Nor was it clear how to compare results collected with different instruments in different jurisdictions or at different times.