BMJ : British medical journal
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Comparison of out of hours care provided by patients' own general practitioners and commercial deputising services: a randomised controlled trial. II: The outcome of care.
To compare the outcome of out of hours care given by general practitioners from patients' own practices and by commercial deputising services. ⋯ Patients are more satisfied with the out of hours care provided by practice doctors than that provided by deputising doctors. Organisation of doctors into large groups may produce lower levels of patient satisfaction, especially when associated with increased delays in the time taken to visit. There seem to be no appreciable differences in health outcome between the two types of service.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Comparison of out of hours care provided by patients' own general practitioners and commercial deputising services: a randomised controlled trial. I: The process of care.
To compare the process of out of hours care provided by general practitioners from patients' own practices and by commercial deputising services. ⋯ By contrast with practice doctors, deputising doctors providing out of hours care less readily give telephone advice, take longer to visit at home, and have patterns of prescribing that may be less discriminating.
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To develop a reliable, valid measure of patient satisfaction with out of hours care suitable for large scale service evaluation. ⋯ A reliable, valid measure of patient satisfaction has been developed, suitable for large scale evaluation of out of hours care.
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To evaluate an out of hours cooperative of general practitioners compared with a deputising service. ⋯ The cooperative in this study dealt with patient contacts very differently from the way the deputising service dealt with contacts, fewer patients being visited and fewer receiving prescriptions. The data presented enable other out of hours services to compare their own performance using a standard data collection and analysis program.