The University of Toronto’s Department of Family and Community Medicine’s 14 teaching sites collaborated to launch a joint patient experience survey in the spring of 2020. The survey included questions designed to understand timely access to care, perspectives on virtual care, patient engagement in care and more. Over the past two years the survey has been sent out to thousands of registered patients at each of our teaching sites. The results of these surveys helped us understand both areas of strength and opportunities for improvement. One common area of improvement that arose related to booking appointments and, more specifically, phone wait times. Survey findings to date are available via our webpageand publication.
Focused on learning and improving together, our team developed a multi-session series, 'Share & Learn: Helping patients to access care', exploring how different site teams have approached reducing wait times on the phone. For each session, two speakers review what interventions they have tried at their site, what happened, and what they learned. The information and experiences shared during these sessions were invaluable in learning from each other to improve timely access to primary care across the DFCM teaching sites.
Summary of findings from the Share & Learn sessions:
