• Sean Doherty, Payal Agarwal, Ri Wang, Christopher Meaney, Kirsten Eldridge, Ali N Damji, Debbie Elman, Susanna Fung, Karuna L Gupta, Sakina Walji, Linda Weber, Melissa Witty, and Tara Kiran.
• Department of Family and Community Medicine, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
• Fam Med. 2024 May 1; 56 (5): 286293286-293.

Background And ObjectivesWe compared experiences of patients who reported usually being seen by a resident with those usually seen by a staff physician.MethodsWe analyzed responses to a patient experience survey distributed at 13 family medicine teaching practices affiliated with the University of Toronto between May and June 2020. We analyzed responses to seven questions pertaining to timely access, continuity, and patient-centeredness. We compared responses between two types of usual primary care clinicians and calculated odds ratios before and after adjustment for patient characteristics.ResultsWe analyzed data from 6,545 unique surveys; 18.6% reported their usual clinician was a resident physician. Resident patients were more likely to be older, born outside of Canada, report a high school education or less, and report having difficulty making ends meet. Compared to patients of staff physicians, patients of resident physicians had lower odds of being able to see their preferred primary care clinician and lower odds of getting nonurgent care in a reasonable time. They also had lower odds of reporting patient-centered care, but we found no significant differences in whether the time for an urgent appointment was about right or whether accessing care after hours was easy.ConclusionsIn our setting, patients who reported usually seeing resident physicians had worse continuity of care and timeliness for nonurgent care than patients who reported usually seeing staff physicians despite resident patients being older, sicker, and having a lower socioeconomic position. Postgraduate training programs need to test models to support access and continuity for resident patient panels.

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