Bedside rationing by general practitioners: a postal survey in the Danish public healthcare system.

ABSTRACT:

Background

It is ethically controversial whether medical doctors are morally permitted to ration the care of their patients at the bedside. To explore whether general practitioners in fact do ration in this manner we conducted a study within primary care in the Danish public healthcare system. The purpose of the study was to measure the extent to which general practitioners (GPs) would be willing to factor in cost-quality trade-offs when prescribing medicine, and to discover whether, and if so to what extent, they believe that patients should be informed about this.

Methods

Postal survey of 600 randomly selected Danish GPs, of which 330 responded to the questionnaire. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS, version 14.0) was used to produce general descriptive

SUBMITTER: Lauridsen SM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2567318 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature