How should practices that have branch surgeries facilitate the
distribution of GPAQ questionnaires?
Should salaried GPs be surveyed using GPAQ?
What do I do if I have a GP who only works a small number of sessions per week?
Can the survey be
given to blind patients and patients with learning difficulties?
What do the practice do once all the questionnaires have been returned?
How long will it take to process my data and produce a final report?
Q:
How should practices that have branch surgeries facilitate the
distribution of GPAQ questionnaires?
Practices who
operate from more than one site should distribute questionnaires to patients
from all venues that the surgery works from.
Questionnaires should be distributed approximately in line with the
number of sessions that are offered to patients in each surgery.
Therefore, if a practice work from two branches (A&B), but branch A
offers double the appoints of branch B, double the number of questionnaires
should be given out to patients in branch A.
Some practices have requested reports for all the sites that they work from. As the GPAQ surveys have serial numbers, this may be possible to co-ordinate. Practices will need to keep a note of which surveys they give out in which branch surgery. If your practice operate from more than one site and would like final reports for individual branches, please let PCAG know prior to giving out the questionnaires to patients.
Q: Should salaried GPs be surveyed using GPAQ?
The University of Manchester recommend that any doctors that are permanent at the practice should be surveyed. Therefore, salaried GPs should be included in the survey whereas locums should not.
Q: What do I do if I have a GP who only works a small number of sessions per week?
PCAG require 50 questionnaires back from each GP. This number is significant as it enables GPs to use their results as part of their appraisals. Obviously it will take longer to accumulate the required number of questionnaires for GPs who only do a small number of sessions per week. If you have collected 50 questionnaires for all other GPs in your practice and one part-time GP is slowing the process, please contact PCAG and we will collect the completed questionnaires from you. You can then send us further questionnaires once the part-time GP has accumulated enough surveys.
Q:
Q: If
a child (under 16) is seeing the doctor, should I give questionnaires out to
parents who accompany them?
No.
The GPAQ survey is specifically for patients aged 16 and over. Part
of the questionnaire relates specifically to the consultation with the patient.
Therefore,although an accompanying adult or parent would be able to answer 90%
of the survey, the part relating to the consultation cannot be completed by
small children.
Q:
Can the survey be given to blind patients and patients with learning
difficulties?
A: If the patient is accompanied by someone who can go through the survey with the patient, there is no reason why these patients should be excluded from taking part.
Q: What do the practice do once all the questionnaires have been returned?
PCAG are providing a collection service. This
will ensure that no questionnaires will go missing in the post.
Further, practices will not have to pay postage costs for returning large
quantities of data.
As soon as the practice have completed the survey and all questionnaires have been collected, please contact PCAG. We will arrange to collect the questionnaires at a time convenient to your practice.
Q: What do the practice do if we run out of questionnaires before 50 forms have been collected for each GP?
Please do not photocopy questionnaires as these will not be read by our Formic scanner. If the practice run out of questionnaires, please contact PCAG and we will supply you with more forms.
Q: How long will it take to process my data and produce a final report?
PCAG are facilitating the GPAQ survey for 184 local practices. Therefore, the department are facing a considerable workload and it is possible that in excess of 40,000 patient questionnaires may be returned to us.
The department will endeavour to process data and produce reports as fast as possible. However, to a degree we are dependent on practices completing the survey within 10 weeks of receiving the questionnaires (as requested), otherwise this may create a considerable backlog towards October and November.
It is expected that, on average, practices should receive their reports 6-8 weeks after submitting their data. PCAG hope to complete all reports before the end of 2004, provided all data is returned to the department before the end of October.
Q: How will my practice know how well we are doing?
The report that PCAG produce is extremely comprehensive – 40 pages. Further, reports are produced for individual GPs and the practice overall. All GP reports can be used as part of the appraisal process.
The practice report is comprehensive. In many cases practices will be able to compare their performance with national benchmarks developed by the University of Manchester, who developed the survey. However, it is worth noting that the national benchmarks only relate to results from 16,000 patients.
In addition to the national benchmarks, practices will see a breakdown for each question and this will include details of which answers patients recorded. This will help each practice identify areas where improvements can be made.
Finally, as PCAG are facilitating the survey for the majority of local practices, we will be able to provide local benchmarks – e.g. PCT specific, Leicestershire-wide, LNR-wide, etc. However, we will not be able to produce these benchmarks until all practices from individual PCTs have returned their questionnaires. Hopefully, practices will return surveys on time and not delay this process.
Q: Why do some patients seem to record “completely dissatisfied” for question 12 (overall satisfaction), when prior to that question they seem to have recorded very positive answers over the first two pages of the questionnaire?
Full marks to those of you in general practice who have spotted this problem! Since PCAG started analysing the questionnaires we have also noticed the problem.
Broadly speaking, the reason why this problem seems to be occurring is because prior to question 12, all positive answers appear on the right hand side of the questionnaire. Therefore, patients are becoming conditioned to mark the boxes on the right hand side of each page. However, for question 12, the positive response is on the left hand side. Clearly, some patients are not reading the question properly and are accidentally recording that they are “completely dissatisfied” when they intend to record that they are “completely satisfied”.
Unfortunately, there is little that can be done to alleviate this problem. PCAG cannot look through every single questionnaire where patients have marked that they are “completely dissatisfied” and make a judgement based on previous answers as to whether this is the answer the patient intended to give.
However, PCAG have brought this matter up with the University of Manchester and they accept that there is a problem that may cause practices to underscore on question 12. The University of Manchester have concluded that question 12 isn’t “generally a very good question” and practices may opt to drop the question when they come to analysing their reports.
PCAG have decided that we will continue to include question 12 in our analysis and leave it to practices to decide how they interpret their results for this question.
Some returned questionnaires have been returned filled out with green or in some cases red ink, and these have not proved to be amenable to the scanning process. In the interests of accuracy or results, we therefore recommend that black ink be used when completing the forms.