General Practitioner Time Availability Per Inhabitant Per Year: A New Indicator to Measure Access to Primary Care.

ABSTRACT:

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 r

SUBMITTER: Beer L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10012817 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature