By Martin Fortin
The Patient-Centered Innovations for Persons with Multimorbidity research program, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, had an overall goal to build on existing structures and initiatives to evaluate patient-centered innovations relevant to multimorbidity in primary care. As part of this program, trials were conducted in 2 Canadian provinces, Quebec and Ontario. We reported the Quebec trial where the research team collaborated with a regional health care organization to implement an integrated chronic disease prevention and management program into family medicine groups (FMG), the most prevalent type of primary care practice in Quebec [1].
We conducted a concurrent triangulation mixed methods study, with convergent quantitative and qualitative components. The first component was a pragmatic randomized controlled trial with a delayed intervention in the control group to evaluate the effect of the intervention on patient’s self-management and self-efficacy for managing chronic diseases. The second concurrent component used a descriptive qualitative approach.
Primary outcomes were the Health Education Impact Questionnaire (heiQ) and Self-Efficacy for Managing Chronic Diseases. Secondary outcomes included health status measured by the Veterans RAND 12 Item Health Survey (VR-12), quality of life measured with the EuroQol 5-dimensions questionnaire, psychological distress, measured with the Kessler 6-item Psychological Distress Scale Questionnaire (K6), and health behaviors (tobacco smoking, physical activity, healthy eating, and high risk alcohol consumption) assessed with specific questions from the Enquête de santé du Saguenay–Lac-Saint Jean 2007 and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.
The trial randomized 284 patients (144 in intervention group, 140 in control group). After 4 months, the intervention showed a neutral effect for the primary outcomes, but there was significant improvement in 2 health behaviors (healthy eating, and physical activity).
The descriptive qualitative evaluation revealed that the patients reinforced their self-efficacy and improved their self-management which was divergent from the quantitative results. Qualitatively, the intervention was evaluated as positive.
The combination of qualitative and quantitative designs proved to be a good design for evaluating this complex intervention.