There are more family doctors and nurse practitioners per person than ever before in Canada, but primary care access is falling, inequities are widening, and clinicians report stress and overwork. Several factors may explain the gap between primary care need and system capacity. Population aging, increasing clinical complexity, and increasing service intensity may shape primary care needs. Falling practice volumes, increasing administrative workload, changing clinician demographics, and new health system roles (e.g. hospitalist and focused practices) may shape system capacity. Existing workforce planning tools consider population demographics, but not these other potentially important factors.

This mixed-method, multi-province (British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia) project explores how primary care workload, factors shaping population service use, and factors shaping system capacity are changing over time, and use this information to develop planning tools to estimate future need and capacity.