Primary care team reorganisation after the SARS-COV-2 pandemic. Differences between Catalonia and Spain in the PRICOV study

Abstract

Background: Spanish primary care services are managed differently by each region's authorities. Catalonia started its services provision and design nearly two decades before other Spanish regions and developed nurses' roles and task shifting in primary care.

Purpose: This work identifies differences in the Europe PRICOV-19 study answers between Catalonia and those submitted from the rest of Spain regarding how primary care teams (PCT) were organised during the SARS-CoV-2-2019 pandemic, how tasks and roles changed, and the pandemic's impact on the care providers. Initially, we computed bivariate relationships and tested using contingency association and unpaired Wilcoxon.

Analysis: Still, we estimated multiple linear regressions controlling with a list of individual and GP practice characteristics and clustering standard errors at the kind of location.

Results: Main statistically significant differences were found in the adaptation to the new tasks, the ability to solve most health problems, and specific accessibilities to primary care. In Catalonia, satisfaction with the adaptation to the new tasks was higher (41.9% satisfied and 30.2% neutral) than in the rest of Spain (50.9% dissatisfaction). Also, GPs in Catalonia reported to a greater extent than the rest of Spain that chronic patients were listed for extensive follow-up. These differences may be related to Catalonia's strategy for empowering primary care professionals other than family doctors.

Conclusions: Considering future pandemics, demographic ageing, and professional shortages, we point out the potential benefits of these changes in PCT organisations and the need to review the centres's design.

Keywords: covid pandemic; primary care; primary care teams; task shifting.