Key Success Factors
and Pitfalls
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Primary Care Toolkit for Family Physicians
The College of Family Physicians of Canada
Relationships to Patients
If there is one thing that especially attracts medical students to Family Medicine, it is the potential for developing and maintaining long-lasting caring relationships with their patients. In the development of interdisciplinary collaboration in primary care, this must not be lost to either the patients who highly value this aspect of care, nor to the practitioners who receive great professional satisfaction and strive to deliver one-on-one healthcare to their individual patients.
It is crucial to ensure that collaborative care models do not diminish physician-patient relationships but rather, serve to enhance and enrich them. Once the model is implemented, patients will deal with non-physician providers as well as their own family physician. They should be educated to recognize the particular talents, skills, and knowledge of each provider as being unique to the provision of high-quality healthcare.