Primary care consultations in the UK between 2006 and 2015: An analysis of electronic health records
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Health Policy, Public Health
- Keywords
- electronic health records, primary care, consultations, resource use
- Copyright
- © 2017 Eaton
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Primary care consultations in the UK between 2006 and 2015: An analysis of electronic health records. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3295v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3295v1
Abstract
Primary care accounts for the majority of patient contact within the NHS. Over time medical science and healthcare needs change, which may lead to differences in how patients are treated in primary care for good or ill. In this study over 700 million consultations were analysed over a 10 year period between 2006 and 2015 inclusively to examine the trends in how people access primary care. The number of consultations per person per year initially increased in the first two years from 5.81 to 5.92, an increase of 0.11(0.10 to 0.12 95% CI) before declining to 3.7 by 2015, a decrease of 2.21 from the peak in 2008(2.20 to 2.23 95% CI). Consultations were increasingly handled by health care assistants instead of Nurses and GPs, and increased slightly in duration for all types of staff. This reduction in number of consultations is theorized to be a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, further research is recommended on the impact of economic recessions and austerity policies on health care provision.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints