Promoting Family Practice Maternity Care through a Public Directory of Physicians and Pregnancy-Related Resources

For more than three years, Junxion has provided strategic and organizing support for the Primary Maternity Care Network Committee at the Vancouver Division of Family Practice. This committed team of experienced family physicians have launched several projects that advance the quality and accessibility of primary maternity care in Vancouver; they have won national awards for their work in sharing best practices and skills training to other GPs. The PregnancyVancouver.ca website is one of their most visible accomplishments.

The Challenge

Province-wide, the share of births attended by family physicians (FPs) is in decline. If an ‘average member of the public’ were asked who provides maternity care and attends deliveries in BC, the current answer would be “midwives and obstetricians”. The unique knowledge and skills that family physicians bring to the delivery of maternity care, as a result of their experience in providing comprehensive care throughout the life cycle, are not widely recognized, even though family physicians have lower rates of intervention (i.e. emergency surgical or medical procedures during labour) than obstetricians and equal or better outcomes for healthy pregnant women.

How We Helped

We worked with the Vancouver Division of Family Practice’s Primary Maternity Care Network Committee to design and build an online directory of Vancouver family physicians providing labour and delivery care, a set of prenatal and postpartum care checklists and referral form templates for their family physician colleagues not providing maternity care, and curated collection of helpful resources, articles and advice for pregnant women. The website and an associated multi-channel marketing campaign were launched in the Fall of 2015 and is available at pregnancyvancouver.ca.

Measuring Success

Women using the site report that they trust the resources there over information from other online sources because it has been reviewed by a family physician. Physicians listed on the site have reported a significant number of patients self-referring from the directory both during and after the campaign. Three other divisions of family practice in the province have expressed interest in developing a similar resource for their own community.