AAFP

The 2019 Practice Profile Survey Summary is available, which describes the practices of family physicians in clinical practice and patient care.

2019 Topics include:

• Practice characteristics (hours worked per week, patient panel size, patient encounters, advanced primary care functions)
• Laboratory testing (clinical lab tests, decreased lab test offered)
• Hospital practice (hospital privileges, babies delivered)
• Patient insurance coverage (insurance coverage of patient panel, Medicare acceptance, wellness and care coordination service provided to Medicare patients^, Medicaid acceptance)
• Delivery Care Model (direct primary care awareness and participation)
• Income information (individual income)

The 2019 Practice Profile was designed to collect information describing the practices of family physicians primarily working in clinical practice and patient care (as opposed to physicians primarily working in administration, research, teaching, urgent care, emergency rooms, etc.). The questions continue the collection of information captured on previous Practice Profile studies as well as obtain new information about a variety of topics.

AAFP

AAFP’s EveryONE Project offers tools for screening patients to identify social needs, and addressing health equity in your practice. The newest tool is Neighborhood Navigator. It provides the next step for improving social determinants of health among your patients. You can use this interactive tool at point of care to connect patients to resources and programs in their neighborhoods. This tool lists over 40,000 social services by zip code, including:

• Food
• Housing
• Transportation
• Employment aid
• Legal aid
• Financial

For more information on the Neighborhood Navigator, check out these Neighborhood Navigator Training videos and for other AAFP tools to address social determinants of health and improve health equity, visit The EveryONE Project.

AAFP

Recent findings were published in the October issue of Southern Medical Journal titled “Teaching Medical Students in the Rural Setting Long Term: Physicians’ Attitudes and Perceptions,” to understand the kind of support rural preceptors need to confidently teach medical students in a proposed eight-month longitudinal rural curriculum.

Key outcomes revealed four themes that collectively captured physicians’ perceptions as to what they needed to conduct successful long-term preceptorships:

Preceptor characteristics: Preceptors should have a desire to teach and be committed to learning preceptor teaching skills. They also should have a facility and panel of patients amenable to teaching the required curriculum.

Student characteristics: Students should be enthusiastic learners, engage with the practice and the community, and have characteristics such as a rural background and primary care interests “that make them candidates to be recruited into rural practice,” declared the researchers.

Community support: Communities should help provide student housing and get students actively involved in community activities by inviting them to events.

Institutional support: Academic institutions should offer preceptor development, mindfully match preceptors and students, use structured curriculum and evaluations, provide regular communications, and offer “benefits that make the preceptor role feasible,” wrote the authors.

Read more at Study: What Do Long-term Rural Preceptors Need to Succeed?