Sri Lankan medical graduates and social scientist students, fluent in both spoken and written English and trained in qualitative data collection, organised the recruitment and conducted the interviews in Sinhala or Tamil.
P-OO & KOP participated in planning, conceptualizing, designing and study implementation. ET participated in designing the data collection protocol, organising field activities, data collection, data entry and running the analysis.
Because of the way the data collection is organised, interviews are carried out for a period of two years: 2009 and 2010.
Data collection was organised by several local co-ordinators.
Data collection was organised as site visits lasting two-three days with each of the 15 community pharmacies.
Patient participation rates were high, however, and given the way the data collection was organised there was little potential for case selection by GPs.
Although, subject's recruitment and field data collection are organised at regional level, a centralized databank is constituted to introduce inter-regional data, with an on-line access to the 4 partners (Capture system®).
Data collection was organised separately in each country by the co-authors involved in the project (CJR for France, JS and IN for Germany, CJA and AT for the Netherlands, and DGE and HH for UK).
If data collection is organised regionally or different data collection software is used as it is often the case for health care services, access to data sources can be difficult, impeding representativeness of the whole country and delaying setup of a system, as reported for example for syndromic surveillance systems in England [ 20].
We also asked respondents how they felt this data collection should be organised.
