Published 5 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4060
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4060

Letters

Ethnic group and medical care

What about doctor factors?

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

Mead and Roland report differences in patients’ evaluation of medical care that are related to the patient’s ethnic group.1 They may not have corrected for a possible confounder, the doctor’s characteristics.

We examined the relation between patients’ ethnic group and the percentage of UK graduate doctors at practice level using data on country of primary qualification in the 2004 general practice research database and patient declared ethnic group in the 2006-7 GP patient survey.2 3 We summed the Asian and mixed Asian subgroups and the black and mixed black subgroups in the survey to reflect the groups in Mead and Roland’s study. We were able to match UK graduate and ethnicity data for 8047 of the 8386 (96%) English practices in the 2006-7 GP patient survey.

We found a positive relation between patient declared white British status and the percentage of UK graduates in the practice (r=0.35, P<0.001). We . . . [Full text of this article]

Claire L Morgan, researcher1, Hendrik J Beerstecher, GP principal1

1 Sittingbourne, Kent ME10 4JA

clmorgan@bluebottle.com


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Relevant Article

Understanding why some ethnic minority patients evaluate medical care more negatively than white patients: a cross sectional analysis of a routine patient survey in English general practices
Nicola Mead and Martin Roland
BMJ 2009 339: b3450. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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