Journal article
International variations in primary care physician consultation time: a systematic review of 67 countries.
- Abstract:
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Objective
To describe the average primary care physician consultation length in economically developed and low-income/middle-income countries, and to examine the relationship between consultation length and organisational-level economic, and health outcomes.
Design and outcome measures
This is a systematic review of published and grey literature in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian languages from 1946 to 2016, for articles reporting on primary care physician consultation lengths. Data were extracted and analysed for quality, and linear regression models were constructed to examine the relationship between consultation length and health service outcomes.
Results
One hundred and seventy nine studies were identified from 111 publications covering 28 570 712 consultations in 67 countries. Average consultation length differed across the world, ranging from 48 s in Bangladesh to 22.5 min in Sweden. We found that 18 countries representing about 50% of the global population spend 5 min or less with their primary care physicians. We also found significant associations between consultation length and healthcare spending per capita, admissions to hospital with ambulatory sensitive conditions such as diabetes, primary care physician density, physician efficiency and physician satisfaction.
Conclusion
There are international variations in consultation length, and it is concerning that a large proportion of the global population have only a few minutes with their primary care physicians. Such a short consultation length is likely to adversely affect patient healthcare and physician workload and stress.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-017902
Authors
- Publisher:
- BMJ Publishing Group
- Journal:
- BMJ Open More from this journal
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 10
- Pages:
- e017902
- Publication date:
- 2017-10-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2017-07-31
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2044-6055
- ISSN:
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2044-6055
- Pmid:
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29118053
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:744779
- UUID:
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uuid:3f6437af-3ecd-4e95-9d95-f4dac3e99985
- Local pid:
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pubs:744779
- Source identifiers:
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744779
- Deposit date:
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2018-01-19
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Dambha-Miller et al
- Copyright date:
- 2017
- Notes:
- © Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2017. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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