The Team Assessment of Self-Management Support (TASMS): A new approach to uncovering how teams support people with chronic conditions

Canadian and other healthcare systems are adopting primary care models founded on multidisciplinary, team-based care. This paper describes the development and use of a new tool, the Team Assessment of Self-Management Support (TASMS), designed to understand and improve the self-management support teams provide to patients with chronic conditions. Team Assessment of Self-Management Support captures the time providers spend supporting seven different types of self-management support (process strategies, resources strategies, disease controlling strategies, activities strategies, internal strategies, social interactions strategies, and healthy behaviours strategies), their referral patterns and perceived gaps in care. Four unique features make TASMS user-friendly: it is patient-centred, it uses provider-level data to create a team profile, it has the ability to be tailored to needs (diagnosis and visit type), and visual presentation of results are quickly and intuitively understood by both providers and planners. Currently being used by providers and planners in Nova Scotia, scaling up will allow more widespread use.