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General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care
INTRODUCTION: The number of general practitioners (GPs) per inhabitant, used commonly as an indicator of primary care (PC) access, reports only imprecisely on the true availability of GPs. The aim of this study is to develop a new PC access indicator that better reflects the availability of GPs to t...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10012817/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36925785 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frhs.2022.832116 |
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author | Beer, Laura Cohidon, Christine Senn, Nicolas |
author_facet | Beer, Laura Cohidon, Christine Senn, Nicolas |
author_sort | Beer, Laura |
collection | PubMed |
description | INTRODUCTION: The number of general practitioners (GPs) per inhabitant, used commonly as an indicator of primary care (PC) access, reports only imprecisely on the true availability of GPs. The aim of this study is to develop a new PC access indicator that better reflects the availability of GPs to take care of patients at the population level, the average GP time availability per inhabitant per year. METHODS: We extracted the data from the Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Primary Care Physicians conducted in 2015, including 11 Western countries and 12,049 randomly drawn GPs. We built the indicator by combining two questions about weekly workload in hours and percentage of time spent on face-to-face contact with patients. The indicator was then adjusted regarding the number of GPs, the weeks worked per year and the country's population size. RESULTS: On average, GPs worked 43 h a week. The average time spent on face-to-face contact with patients was 30.5 h/week (35 h including emails and telephone contact), ranging from 22 h in Sweden and 38 h in France. The mean time available of GPs for face-to-face contact was 69 min/inhabitant/year, ranging from 38 min in Sweden to 118 min in Australia. Including email and telephone contact, the mean contact time rose to 79 min/inhabitant/year, ranging from 48 min in Sweden to 127 min in Australia. CONCLUSION: The new indicator provides an accurate and sensitive estimate of a GP's true time availability at the population level. Results should be interpreted in the context of PC workforce organization, which may help guide GP workforce development. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10012817 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-100128172023-03-15 General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care Beer, Laura Cohidon, Christine Senn, Nicolas Front Health Serv Health Services INTRODUCTION: The number of general practitioners (GPs) per inhabitant, used commonly as an indicator of primary care (PC) access, reports only imprecisely on the true availability of GPs. The aim of this study is to develop a new PC access indicator that better reflects the availability of GPs to take care of patients at the population level, the average GP time availability per inhabitant per year. METHODS: We extracted the data from the Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Primary Care Physicians conducted in 2015, including 11 Western countries and 12,049 randomly drawn GPs. We built the indicator by combining two questions about weekly workload in hours and percentage of time spent on face-to-face contact with patients. The indicator was then adjusted regarding the number of GPs, the weeks worked per year and the country's population size. RESULTS: On average, GPs worked 43 h a week. The average time spent on face-to-face contact with patients was 30.5 h/week (35 h including emails and telephone contact), ranging from 22 h in Sweden and 38 h in France. The mean time available of GPs for face-to-face contact was 69 min/inhabitant/year, ranging from 38 min in Sweden to 118 min in Australia. Including email and telephone contact, the mean contact time rose to 79 min/inhabitant/year, ranging from 48 min in Sweden to 127 min in Australia. CONCLUSION: The new indicator provides an accurate and sensitive estimate of a GP's true time availability at the population level. Results should be interpreted in the context of PC workforce organization, which may help guide GP workforce development. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-04-06 /pmc/articles/PMC10012817/ /pubmed/36925785 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frhs.2022.832116 Text en Copyright © 2022 Beer, Cohidon and Senn. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Health Services Beer, Laura Cohidon, Christine Senn, Nicolas General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care |
title | General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care |
title_full | General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care |
title_fullStr | General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care |
title_full_unstemmed | General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care |
title_short | General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care |
title_sort | general practitioner time availability per inhabitant per year: a new indicator to measure access to primary care |
topic | Health Services |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10012817/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36925785 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frhs.2022.832116 |
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