November 17, 2022 – As director of the Robert Graham Center – part of the research division of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) – Dr. Yalda Jabbarpour fields a lot of questions from primary care doctors. For instance, during the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, she was hearing a lot of the same questions: “Why aren’t primary care doctors getting more of the vaccine? We thought primary care offices were the people who traditionally vaccinated the public rather than retail clinics or the hospitals.”
“We said, ‘Yes, anecdotally you feel that. But let’s look at the research.’”
So Dr. Jabbarpour and her team looked at the research on past vaccinations and found that their hypothesis was actually true – the majority of the vaccines that were given in the United States have been given in the primary care office.
“That data was instrumental in helping the AAFP and family physicians advocate for getting COVID-19 vaccines into the hands of primary care physicians,” said Dr. Jabbarpour, who along with her role with the Robert Graham Center, is a family physician and works clinically with MedStar Health, a large health system in Washington D.C.
The Robert Graham Center is a research center that aims to create and curate evidence to support primary care and policies that support primary care. The Center doesn’t do advocacy work. They are not policy makers, but researchers who study primary care issues, such as healthcare access, the demographics of the workforce, how much the country is spending on primary care, and the inner workings of the primary care system.
The Robert Graham Center is part of the research division of the American Academy of Family Physicians, but editorially independent. “We ask and answer questions related to primary care. We may have set hypothesis when we enter the process, but we publish what our data shows us, whether that shows that primary care is excelling or that there is work to be done,” Dr. Jabbarpour said.
In an interview with the Journal of Healthcare Contracting, Dr. Jabbarpour discussed some of the Center’s recent findings, reasons behind the workforce shortages and physician burnout, as well as what can be done to better emphasize primary care in the United States.
Read the interview in the latest issue of Journal of Healthcare Contracting.