BMJ 1999;319:579 ( 28 August )

Letters

Researchers got it right in estimating numbers of doctors lost from NHS

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Hall questions the independence of the two methods we used to identify doctors working in the NHS and therefore questions the results obtained by our use of capture-recapture analysis. 1 2 He assumes that both methods depend on doctors' propensity to respond to inquiries. They do not.

We identified doctors working in the NHS by using two fundamentally different approaches. In both cases, the starting point was the nominal list of all doctors who qualified in Great Britain in 1988.

The first approach used the questionnaires of the Medical Careers Research Group sent to all qualifiers regardless of where they were by 1995 (the year of the survey). The information obtained about doctors' employment in the NHS depended on the doctors' responses. The second approach used the Department of Health's records, analysed by the department for the same doctors at the same point in time. These records are based on information . . . [Full text of this article]
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to StumbleUpon StumbleUpon   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?

Relevant Article

Authors may have underestimated number of young doctors still working in NHS
G H Hall
BMJ 1999 318: 1486. [Extract] [Full Text]

This article has been cited by other articles:

  • Johansson, B A, Lundh, B L (2003). Bilateral same day phacoemulsification: 220 cases retrospectively reviewed. Br J Ophthalmol 87: 285-290 [Abstract] [Full text]  
  • SMITH, G. T, LIU, C. S C (2001). Is it time for a new attitude to ""simultaneous"" bilateral cataract surgery?. Br J Ophthalmol 85: 1489-1496 [Full text]  
Access jobs at BMJ Careers
Whats new online at Student BMJ