Person-centered primary care measure shows validity across 35 countries

Researchers administered the Person-Centered Primary Care Measure (PCPCM) in 28 languages to 35 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries to examine the reliability and validity of the measure and to explore the differences in primary care across 35 OECD countries.

The PCPCM is an 11-item, patient-reported measure developed in 2017 to assess primary care qualities such as health care accessibility, advocacy, community context, family context, goal-oriented care, health promotion, integration and relationship. Survey constructs are based on what patients, clinicians and, to a lesser extent, payers say is most important to them in primary care.

The PCPCM showed solid psychometric properties across all languages and countries, according to the study. The results are important as they provide evidence to primary care researchers that the PCPCM is able to collect data with high comparability, despite differences in geography, culture, or language. The authors encourage further ecological and individual data analyses of the PCPCM to learn about different approaches to health care across different countries.

The research was published in The Annals of Family Medicine.