As many of the services valued here are delivered free at the point of use, conversions based on specific comparisons, for example, of a GP consultation, were not possible.
He went on to illustrate this by giving an example of how a homeopathic consultation provided an alternative space for discussing in-depth the reasons behind a patient not wanting surgery, giving the GP time to work with the patient to accept it on their own terms.
For example, a consultation may take 15 min of a doctors' time, 10 min of a nurse's time, make use of certain equipment, and result in a number of drugs being dispensed.
There are plenty of opportunities for all involved to form and shape the future of altmetrics - for example Hefce are in the process of a consultation with the scholarly community to try to establish how (and which) metrics could be used to further evaluate academic research.
The British government, for example, has begun a consultation on ways to reduce the promotional effect of cigarette packs.
In addition to the fundamental benefit of funding the tribes to develop their own report, this process represents an example of true intergovernmental consultation.
The Lililwan study [ 45], arising from community need and prioritised by the Aboriginal community, is one example of a project that involved extensive community consultation to ensure that the community was well-informed and supportive of the study before it started and to obtain 'community consent'.
Taking the example of consultation transcripts, the initial analysis involves taking aspects of the data and ascribing to them some sort of meaning – one might for instance devise a system for identifying different types of questioning by the practitioner: open, closed, hypothetical etc.
To calculate the cost of, for example, an outpatient consultation or a hospital bed-day is often time consuming and costly.
Two examples of incongruous consultation behaviours are: i) consultation with a GP for symptoms self-rated as low impact (designated here as "low impact consultations") and ii) no consultation with a GP for symptoms self-rated as high impact (designated here as "high impact non-consultations").
Some examples of this consultation subset included multiple opportunities to discuss AOD topics.
