General practice postal surveys: a questionnaire too far?

A primary care led NHS, driven by evidence based practice, needs to build on a firm foundation of research in primary care. As researchers are making increasing use of questionnaire surveys to assess general practitioners' views and attitudes, so response rates to questionnaire surveys among general practitioners are dropping. The reasons include lack of perceived relevance of the research and lack of information and feedback about it, and researchers need to be more aware of the realities of everyday practice. Approaches that might reverse this trend include monitoring all research activities going on in an area to ensure that practices are not overused, giving general practitioners incentives to participate, and improving the relevance of research and the quality of questionnaires.

A strong research culture in general practice is necessary to enable general practitioners and primary health care teams to meet the evolving medical needs of their practice populations.1 In the new primary health care led NHS, with the focus on evidence based practice, there is an increased need for research and development. As the balance continues to shift from hospital care to primary health care and community services, the search for information from general practitioners is likely to continue to increase.2 Yet, just when general practice has its greatest opportunity to seize the high ground of policy, there is widespread concern over job satisfaction, morale, autonomy, workload, bureaucracy, recruitment, and retention.3

For reasons of costs and generalisability of research findings, large scale postal surveys of general practitioners are often carried out to obtain information and to ascertain attitudes about current health issues. Many studies, …