General practitioners examples

Promotional material should be tailored to the audience to whom it is directed. For example, promotional material devised for general practitioners might not be appropriate for hospital doctors and, similarly, material devised for clinicians might not be appropriate for use with National Health Service administrative staff. 

Stock ordering forms in Northern Ireland and Scotland are used by general practitioners to order stock drugs for use in their surgery (for example, vaccinations). There is no equivalent form for ordering stock in England and Wales. 

Primary care physician (or general practitioner or family doctor) and/or referring physician will be informed of study participation and any significant problems arising during the study. Some subjects may not be comfortable with this requirement, for example in a study of sexually transmitted diseases, they may not wish the doctor, perhaps a family friend, to be aware of their situation. If this is the case, the subject is not eligible for the study as it is vital to confirm history with the primary care physician... 

Cohort studies can be prospective, as the Royal College of General Practitioners study illustrates, or retrospective. Some prospective cohort studies follow a large population over decades. For example, the Nurses Health Study was begun in 1976 to investigate the potential long-term consequences of the use of oral... 

Many studies have shown that patients undergoing long-term treatment in particular do not succeed in taking their medication correctly over a long period of time, and the scale of this problem can only be described as epidemic For example, 15% of all general practitioners prescriptions fail to result in a pharmacy dispensing (Beardon et al 1993) half of all patients who have their prescriptions filled then do not take the prescribed medication at all or do not take it correctly 30% of all prescriptions are used incorrectly and cause harm to health and about 7-8% of all hospitalizations could be avoided with earlier detection of non-compliance or reduction of excessive drug intake. 

These databases have been utilized in pharmacoepidemiology research for several decades in North America and Europe. Most reflect the underlying qualities of the health-care delivery system. For example, EHR databases for a particular physician in the United States may not capture health care provided to the same patient outside of that practice, while databases from general practitioner (GP) gatekeeper systems (as in the United Kingdom) generally capture most of the patient s interactions because they must be referred and have care coordinated through the GP. 

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