Recent Advances in Assessment Tools for Family Doctor Teams

With the advancement and development of the family doctor system, family doctor teams have become a main provider of primary health services, which has raised new requirements for the evaluation of their services. We comprehensively reviewed recent developments in evaluation tools for family doctor teams: examples from the UK, the US, European countries, Australia and Canada have shown that traditional evaluation tools based on the structure-process-outcome model are being replaced by some models that focus more on the team's organizational environment, internal relationships, psychological state and continuous improvement. In China, the development of assessment tools for family doctor teams has been initiated recently, with major manifestations of various research approaches but lack of high-quality theoretical models, and high-quality reliability and validity tests. Moreover, the assessment tools are lack of diverse domains, and indicators for assessing team relationships, emotions and psychology as well as continuous improvement. On the basis of international experience, we recommend using the input-mediator-output-input model as a theoretical basis to develop highly applicable tools for assessing family doctor services in China.