Older Adults’ Perspectives about Primary Care: Informing Nurse Practitioner Led Primary Care

Abstract

This study describes community dwelling older adults’ experiences in accessing and using primary care services from a spectrum of primary care model. This study reports the findings from one focus group. Older adults shared their past and current experiences with primary care and their opinions to inform the design of a new nurse practitioner led primary care service. Inductive thematic analysis was used to develop themes and subthemes. The themes were: lack of voice and value in primary care; communicating information; and primary care vision of older adults for older adults. Older adults have specific health concerns that are currently not being addressed in primary health care systems. Understanding the experiences of older adults’ utilization of primary care services is an important starting point in changing health systems. The findings from this study could be used to inform the ongoing development for a prototype nurse practitioner primary health care service embedded within a social service organization in Western Canada.