Governance & Staffing for Small Primary Care Practices [PHC-07-EN]

Governance & Staffing for Small Primary Care Practices [PHC-07-EN]

Small and solo primary care practices represent the frontline of health service delivery across Georgia and the broader South Caucasus, yet they operate in a structural environment where governance failures — unplanned provider absences without coverage arrangements, staff credentialing gaps, and undocumented scope-of-practice boundaries — carry disproportionate risk for patients who may have no alternative point of care. The World Health Organization’s framework for primary health care strengthening explicitly identifies governance capacity as a precondition for safe, equitable service delivery, and the Joint Commission International’s ambulatory care standards hold small practices to the same accountability principles as hospital outpatient departments. In Georgia’s evolving accreditation landscape, where the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health has progressively aligned licensing requirements with international benchmarks, the absence of proportionate governance structures is increasingly a compliance liability as well as a patient safety concern. This course addresses that gap directly, equipping those who lead or work in small practice settings with operational governance tools that are scaled to their context without sacrificing rigor.

The course draws on WHO’s Building Blocks framework for health systems strengthening, JCI Ambulatory Care Standards (8th edition), and ISO 9001:2015 quality management principles as they apply to small healthcare organizations, translating these into practical, immediately applicable guidance rather than institutional-scale abstractions. Instructional design follows a competency-based approach: each module combines brief evidence-grounded didactic content with structured case scenarios drawn from primary care settings in low-resource and transitional health system environments, including examples directly relevant to Georgian regulatory and accreditation requirements. Self-assessment checkpoints throughout the course allow participants to benchmark their current practice against reference standards before constructing improvement plans.

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Distinguish the governance obligations that apply specifically to small and solo primary care practices under Georgian national accreditation standards and JCI ambulatory care criteria, identifying where current practice meets, partially meets, or falls short of each requirement.
• Design a proportionate on-call and provider-coverage protocol that eliminates unplanned care gaps during physician absence while remaining operationally feasible for practices with fewer than five clinical staff.
• Construct a staff credentialing and scope-of-practice register that satisfies accreditation surveyors, specifying required documentation, verification intervals, and responsible roles for maintenance.
• Implement a structured incident-reporting and near-miss review process adapted to small practice settings, consistent with WHO patient safety reporting principles and applicable national guidance.
• Apply ISO 9001:2015 process management principles to map, document, and periodically audit at least three high-risk clinical or administrative workflows within a small primary care practice.
• Evaluate a practice’s existing governance documentation against a structured self-audit tool, prioritizing corrective actions by patient safety impact and accreditation risk.

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for physicians, nurses, and midwives who serve as de facto practice managers in small or solo primary care settings, as well as for dedicated clinic administrators and quality officers working in ambulatory care organizations with limited institutional support infrastructure. It is equally relevant to family medicine residents and early-career general practitioners in Georgia and neighbouring South Caucasus countries who are establishing or assuming leadership of community-based practices for the first time. Healthcare professionals preparing for national accreditation review or transitioning their practice toward JCI or equivalent international standards will find the content directly actionable.

Course Structure

This fully online, self-paced course comprises five structured modules with an estimated study time of six to eight hours, including case-based exercises and a final applied assessment in which participants complete a governance self-audit for a real or simulated practice. Successful completion earns a GMJ Academy certificate of achievement and qualifies for continuing medical education credit under Georgia’s CPD framework; participants are advised to confirm applicable credit hours with their professional registration body.