National survey to assess GP's views of district psychiatric services
PasOpp report
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Key message
During the spring of 2006 the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services conducted a survey among general practitioners in Norway. In total 2415 Gps answered a questionnaire which included a number of items concerning their experiences with community mental health centres to which they refer patients. The generalisability of the sample is regarded to be satisfactory. Three reports have been produced. The first gives the main results, the second gives an account of the methods used and the third report gives the results for each community mental health centre that was evaluated by Norwegian Gps.
From the Gps’ point of view there is room for improvement at all the community mental health centres. Mean scores on five main dimensions range from 30 to 55 on a 0-100 scale where 100 is the best possible result. The most positive responses from the Gps concern the community mental health centres’ competence in treatment of mentally ill patients. The GP’s experience of cooperation with- and support from the community mental health centres receives the least positive responses. The quality of discharge summaries, emergency medicine as well as the staff situation at the centres received somewhat better responses. However, Gps think that there are too few doctors on some of the community mental health centres.
There are large variations between health regions- and institutions on all the dimensions.
Our results show that there are certain variables that are particularly important for the GP’s evaluations of the main dimensions. These are the GP’s familiarity to the mental health centres, whether they feel that their own evaluation of the patients are taken seriously, whether it has occurred negative episodes which the Gps feel could have been avoided by the mental health centre, and to what degree patients referred from the Gps are denied.