This was a good study;1 however, to play devil’s advocate, I wonder if it would have been worth exploring or discussing the study’s limitations in more detail. For instance, this study is based on data not from traditional general practice, which is probably still by far and large the major provider of GP home visiting, but from a service that appears to be resourced and designed for in-hours visiting and might not have the competing priorities that the average GP surgery might have.
A future study might want to look at total visit requests in traditional general practice (and bespoke services like this one), and the proportion that were responded to by visits, and track that proportion as a priority compared with net numbers, over the seasons, since overall visit requests (and demand for competing everyday practice tasks, such as prescription and document processing workloads) may be lower in summer in any case.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2019
