Primary Care Progress

We know that great healthcare improves health. And we know that great leaders and teams provide great healthcare. Primary Care Progress is focused on what creates and sustains great leaders and teams. Our aim is to support the people at the heart of care who will transform care for all.

In the short-term, it is our goal to help individuals build the mindset and tactical skills needed to create strong interpersonal connections and positive team dynamics. In the long-term, we work to build leadership capacity and drive systems-level change by focusing on three fundamental things:
1. Provider wellbeing, specifically by supporting strong relationships that allow clinicians to be their full, human selves.
2. Fostering strong connections across teams, across professions, and across the wider system.
3. Supporting health professionals to have agency, voice, and power to help drive the systems-level change that healthcare needs.

Our model, Relational Leadership, is an inclusive approach to leadership, focused on consensus building, co-creation, and authentic understanding of one's own and others' experiences and values.

Our vision is to have a healthcare workforce that is connected, empowered, and well; who can provide excellent patient care and drive the positive transformation that our healthcare system so badly needs.

Primary Care Progress (PCP) is creating a more effective, connected, and relational healthcare sector. Our three cornerstone programs are the Student Action Network, the Relational Leadership Institute, and the Leadership Pathway.

Central to our work is the importance of engaging both students and practicing clinicians to create positive change now and in the future. Our programs are interprofessional, with participants representing over 15 health disciplines, including physicians, nurses, physical therapists, medical assistants, and more. Participants are from across generations and career stages, come from diverse backgrounds, and work in a range of clinical settings. The educational experiences we offer are deep and transformational; participants receiving coaching, peer-to-peer support, and ongoing learning opportunities.

PCP is committed to ongoing improvement of our programs and our organizational practices. We hold ourselves accountable in four key ways:

1. Relevance -- The healthcare landscape is continually changing, the pain points clinicians encounter in practice are changing, and the national conversation around healthcare is changing. PCP keeps on the pulse of these ongoing changes, evolving our curriculum and content to meet the needs of the moment.
2. Reach -- We seek to expand the reach of our programs, while maintaining a consistently high-quality experience for participants. In growing our reach, we are intentional about increasing the diversity of participants, geographic locations, healthcare professions, and clinical settings.
3. Response - Based on the response we receive from participants, PCP is thoughtfully iterating and improving our programs. We are continually refining our materials to ensure participants find them meaningful, engaging, and useful.
4. Impact -- We are committed to offering programs that change people’s knowledge, their behavior, and ultimately lead to improvements in performance -- individually, as a team, and as an organization.

Primary Care Progress senior leadership team includes CEO Brian Souza, Chief Program Officer, Jane Cooper-Driver, and Director of Operations, Kate Hansen-Roxas. The Board of Directors is a diverse group of leaders, with deep experience in the healthcare and nonprofit sectors. Founder and Board Chair, Andrew Morris-Singer, is an Internal Medicine physician as well as a thought leader and long-time champion of primary care.

All programs are delivered by a talented team of experienced trainers, composed of practicing healthcare professionals from across the country. Trainers reflect the diversity of background, profession, expertise, and clinical setting reflected in the greater PCP network. COVID-19 has prompted PCP to pause in-person programming and redesign how we deliver our curriculum. Creating more virtual programming will allow PCP to reach more participants at a broader range of clinics, institutions, and health systems.

Primary Care Progress was founded in 2010 by a group of students and faculty at Harvard Medical School. Within a few years the organization expanded to campuses across the country and coalesced into a national Student Action Network. Students and faculty advisors gather each summer for our Leadership Summit, a weekend of engaging workshops and community-building.

In 2017, Primary Care Progress collaborated with Oregon Health and Science University to develop the Relational Leadership Institute (RLI). Participants progress through the semester-long program as an interprofessional and inter-generational cohort of up to 40 people. Building on success and popularity, RLI launched at two new institutions: University of North Carolina and the Relational Leadership Initiative at the University of Utah. These local RLI programs are gaining traction and, based on evaluation findings, are having a significant positive impact on participants. As of 2019, a total of 221 interdisciplinary health professionals and trainees have participated in RLI.

When the global COVID-19 pandemic began, we pivoted to meet the moment. We launched the Relational Response Initiative, which offered those on the front line and others in our network actionable ways to practice Relational Leadership amidst the unfolding COVID-19 crisis. In response to a national reckoning on racism, we began to examine and evolve our curriculum to directly address issues of identity and power in a relational way.

In 2020, PCP marked our 10th anniversary, and we move forward into our next decade with great challenges and opportunities ahead. As ever, PCP is focused on the depth and quality of programming with our core partners:

Understanding that topics like health and race are intertwined, we have begun adapting our curriculum and improving internal processes with a sharper equity and inclusion lens, so that we may better support all PCP stakeholders in bringing a relational response to dialogue and action around race, identity, and power.
As telehealth expands and healthcare teams become increasingly virtual, we are building a new initiative to support now-virtual teams as they adapt to working in increasingly dispersed, remote, and matrixed teams.

Over the next three years, PCP is working to refine our Theory of Change and develop a long term strategic plan. This plan will help define organization-wide impact measures to evaluate the short-term results of our programs, along with long-term assessments of the impact of PCP on graduates’ career trajectories and team efficacy.