Supporting COVID-recovery in primary care clinics serving equity-deserving communities

Background: Since the pandemic, primary care clinicians are struggling to keep up with the added workload, meaning that chronic disease management and cancer screening rates are falling behind. This is especially true for primary care clinicians that do not have the support of interprofessional teams and are trying to care for equity-deserving communities. The Seamless Care Optimizing the Patient Experience (SCOPE) program is a provincial initiative offering a 'virtual' team to primary care clinicians so they can better support their patients. To date, SCOPE only supports "reactive" care; patients present to primary care with challenging problems, and then the primary care clinician calls a SCOPE hotline to access the team. COVID-related backlogs have highlighted the need to enhance this "reactive" support with "proactive" solutions that seek to close care-gaps in chronic disease management and/or cancer screening. Primary goal: To work with the trusted SCOPE platform to design an intervention to reduce health disparities by addressing care-gaps exacerbated by COVID. Approach: This project will follow an integrated knowledge translation (IKT) approach, as well as best-practice guidance for the design and evaluation of complex interventions. I will work collaboratively with an Advisory Network, informing all aspects of the project. Using methods from implementation science we will: 1) Explore barriers and facilitators of a proactive support(s) for primary care clinicians to ease primary care backlog; 2) Co-design a prototype for a proactive intervention; and 3) Refine the developed intervention with input from equity-deserving communities. Impact: This project will work in a collaborative manner to produce an iteratively refined and detailed implementation toolkit of proactive solutions to help with COVID-recovery, which will be presented to leaders of Ontario Health Teams.