Abstract
Well child care (WCC) is the provision of routine preventative care and vaccinations to infants and children. In Canada, physicians provide the majority of this type of care, whereas in other developed countries, nurses provide most WCC. New models of shared care between nurses and family physicians should be explored. This pilot project aimed to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of shared nurse-physician WCC for a cohort of healthy children. A total of 20 participants had nurse-physician alternating WCC visits, which were compared with physician-provided WCC visits. The feasibility was evaluated through chart audits and the acceptability was evaluated through interviews with the physicians, nurses, and the patients' parents. The results showed that physicians and nurses discuss a similar percentage of Rourke Baby Record topics, and that families and clinic staff were accepting of this new model of care. This intervention could liberate time for Canadian family physicians, thereby improving access to care.
Highlights
Well child care (WCC) is the provision of routine preventative care and vaccinations to infants and children
Record items completed at each visit and found that nurses and physicians both completed a similar percentage of the Rourke Baby record items
Our pilot project was modelled on the type of care seen in many developed countries where registered nurses provide most WCC, and our competency mapping exercise showed that the tasks expected at a WCC visit are all within the scope of practice of a registered nurse in Ontario
Summary
Well child care (WCC) is the provision of routine preventative care and vaccinations to infants and children and, in Canada, the majority of this type of care is provided by family physicians and paediatricians (Guttmann et al, 2006; 2010). A shared-care model for WCC would decrease the time burden associated with caring for infants and children in the first two years of life and potentially enable family physicians to continue to accept infants into their practice, ensuring a continuously balanced practice spanning the age spectrum. This model has the potential to liberate time for the family physician to care for more acutely ill patients
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