Towards a generic competency framework for all primary care professionals: a qualitative research protocol

Vanneste et al. BMC Primary Care (2025) 26:367 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12875-025-03051-1 S T U DY P R OTO CO L BMC Primary Care Open Access Towards a generic competency framework for all primary care professionals: a qualitative research protocol Lotte Vanneste1*, Pauline Boeckxstaens1, Tony Claeys2, Mieke Embo3,4,5, Hildegard Gobeyn6,7, Hester W. H. Smeets8, Giannoula Tsakitzidis9, Leen Van Landschoot10,11 and Peter Pype1 Abstract Background A strong primary care is key to a high-quality healthcare system. Due to challenges in primary care, competent professionals, whose competencies are aligned with the needs of practice, are needed. To our knowledge, a generic transdisciplinary competency framework encompassing all primary care professionals across different disciplines is currently lacking. Competency frameworks and Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are a way to capture competencies. EPAs describe the activities that professionals are expected to perform and form a bridge between competency frameworks and clinical practice. By identifying professional activities, our objective is to develop and validate a generic transdisciplinary competency framework applicable to all primary care professionals. Methods This research protocol follow a qualitative research design and describes three phases: (1) a scoping review, (2) an ethnographic study that aims to develop a competency framework, and (3) a validation study in practice. A combination of literature review, interviews, focus groups, observations, and expert consultations will be used to ensure data triangulation. Qualitative data will be collected from primary care professionals, experts, patients and informal caregivers in Flanders, Belgium. Discussion A transdisciplinary competency framework for all primary care professional has the potential to contribute to a stronger sense of professional identity, by providing a cohesive set of competencies that define their roles and responsibilities. These findings could inform continuous professional development for primary care professionals and educational development for undergraduate health and welfare students to be better prepared for practice in primary care. Trial registration This study is approved by the ethical committee of Ghent University Hospital with number: ONZ2024–0288. Each participant will need to sign an informed consent to be eligible to participate. Keywords Primary care, Professional competence, Ethnography, Competency framework, Continuous Professional development *Correspondence: Lotte Vanneste Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s) 2025. 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To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creati vecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Vanneste et al. BMC Primary Care (2025) 26:367 Background Primary care is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a model of care that supports firstcontact, accessible, continuous, comprehensive and coordinated person-focused care [1, 2]. A strong primary care organisation and workforce are key to a high-quality healthcare system. Primary care is characterised by its own specific context with challenges [3]. Demographic changes are one of these challenges, people live longer with more complex health conditions [4, 5]. There is a growing number of persons with complex and chronic conditions; however, healthcare systems predominantly adopt single-disease approaches, which do not adequately address the complexities of multimorbidity [4, 6]. Complex conditions require more integrated services; however, challenges exist in coordinating and integrating care across the silos of health and social services [5, 7, 8]. Other challenges focus on social, economic and political changes [9]. This creates a burden on the healthcare system and especially on primary care [10]. These described challenges make primary care a complex landscape of practice. A landscape of practice is defined as ‘a complex system of communities of practice and the boundaries between them’ [11]. In order to understand what a landscape of practice is, we must first grasp the concept of a community of practice. Communities of practice are defined as ‘groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on an ongoing basis [12]. A community of practice could be an informal network, a support group, a formal network, or a multidisciplinary team, as the interpretation of a community of practice in healthcare is inconsistent [13]. Different communities of practice form the landscape of practice. Becoming more knowledgeable in your own landscape of practice is a success factor for interdisciplinary collaboration in practice [14]. Within this research protocol, we define primary care as a landscape of practice. Competent healthcare professionals are needed to meet these challenges in the primary care landscape of practice [15, 16]. The primary care workforce needs to be interdisciplinary to counter this complexity, and includes professionals addressing: health promotion, disease prevention, treatment, rehabilitation, palliative care, public health, and social inequalities [9]. To thrive in the primary care landscape of practice, primary care professionals must be able to meet the complex needs in this context. Therefore, competencies aligned with the needs of practice are required [9, 17]. Competencies are the knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviour someone needs to perform their daily tasks [18]. Competencies ensure that professions are well defined and help to analyse and evaluate the expertise of the profession and the Page 2 of 10 professional [19]. A combination of discipline-specific competencies and generic competencies is necessary. In the literature, this is described as T-shaped professionals [20]. T-shaped professionals have a depth of knowledge in one discipline and a breadth of knowledge in understanding other disciplines with boundary-crossing competencies. Within primary (...truncated)