The National Primary Medical Care Survey was undertaken to describe primary health care in New Zealand, including the characteristics of providers and their practices, the patients they see, the problems presented and the management offered. The study covered private general practices (ie, family doctors), community-governed organisations, and Accident and Medical (A&M) clinics and Emergency Departments. It was intended to compare data across practice types as well as over time.
Subsidiary aims included gathering information on the activities of nurses in primary health care, trialling an electronic data collection tool and developing coding software.
It is intended to compare data across practice these types and between the present study and the Waikato Primary Medical Care Survey (WaiMedCa) carried out in 1991/92.
This paper provides a descriptive report on the week-day, day-time content of the work of private general practitioners (GPs). No statistical tests are applied. Other papers will report on after-hours activities and on other types of practice, and will analyse differences in practice content that have occurred over time or that exist between practice settings.
Purpose
A nationally representative, multi-stage sample of private GPs, stratified by place and practice type, was drawn. Each GP was asked to provide data on themselves and on their practice, and to report on a 25% sample of patients in each of two week-long periods. Over the same period, all community-governed primary health care practices in New Zealand were invited to participate, as were a 50% random sample of all A&M clinics, and four representative hospital emergency departments.
Medical practitioners in general practices and A&M clinics completed questionnaires, as did the nurses associated with them. Patient and visit data were recorded on a purpose-designed form.