Physician Practice Enhancement Program

To ensure safe, competent and ethical care for patients, all BC physicians who provide community-based care in private offices or multi-physician clinics, or work as long- and short-term locums, will participate in the program at some point in their career.

A quality improvement approach that partners with physicians and surgeons

The program aligns with the College strategic plan and ensures that strategic pillars—stakeholder engagement, continuous quality improvement, regulatory innovation, and cultural safety and humility—are prioritized.

A collegial, educational program

The PPEP is a collegial program that provides feedback on clinical practice, as well as recommendations for enhancement and improvement.

The program provides feedback to physicians on three main areas:

Our goal is to provide feedback across multiple domains that may impact a physician's professional performance, as outlined in the Cambridge model for delineating performance and competence.

Though a multi-component approach, the program provides external evaluation of clinical practice and helps identify needs. Program feedback and educational support are provided to help physicians meet appropriate and current standards of practice throughout their professional lives.

Ensuring quality patient care

Quality improvement

All physicians strive to provide the highest quality care to their patients, but it is always possible to improve quality.

Physicians use quality improvement approaches every day in practice. These ideas are used to improve future patient interactions and improve clinical care:

  • observation
  • gather data
  • make inferences
  • previous experience

These skills are key to a quality improvement framework that aims to answer:

  • What are we trying to accomplish?
  • How will we know that a change is an improvement?
  • What changes can we make that will result in improvement?

Our quality improvement approach to assessments allows us to leverage the skills and knowledge that are already part of clinical practice.

Patient safety

A quality improvement approach does not necessarily remove the need for quality assurance. Quality assurance is needed to establish confidence that a physician’s performance meets a standard that ensures patient safety. Quality improvement is a framework to systematically improve practice performance and improve how care is delivered to patients. Quality improvement and quality assurance are complementary of each other in order to continually improve the quality of health care.

Recognized assessment process to confirm competency

In BC, participation in a peer assessment program is mandated under the authority of the Health Professions Act, and section 9-1 of the College Bylaws made under the HPA.

Physicians actively practising in BC must participate in a recognized assessment process to confirm competency in their scope of practice.

Quality improvement approach

The Physician Practice Enhancement Panel provides program oversight and is a panel of the Quality Assurance Committee, a statutory committee that reports directly to the Board.

The Quality Assurance Committee performs the following functions:

  • reviews and promotes high standards of practice among registrants
  • assesses the professional performance of registrants
  • recommends mandatory continuing education to the Board

The scope of the Quality Assurance Committee is set out in section 1-19 of the College Bylaws under the HPA.

Using feedback to improve the program

Learn more about the theoretical models that shape the PPEP and the multi-component feedback...
Learn more about how PPEP evaluates internally and continuously strives for quality improvement
Learn more about how PPEP stays current in the areas of physician assessment and physician feedback