Finally, we used head counts of practitioners, not more sophisticated measures of doctors' exposure to complaint risk, such as volume of patients treated or procedures conducted.
Third, we used head counts of practitioners, not more sophisticated measures of doctors' exposure to complaint risk, such as volume of patients treated or procedures conducted.
Measures of doctor-patient interaction are more likely to vary between doctors than between practices, but considerable variation at the level of the patient and random variation exist.
Although many had some evidence of validity, it was generally limited, and it was not clear how well they correlated with other measures of doctor performance.
Second, we were not able to obtain direct measures of doctor "costliness", such as the mean cost per patient, and thus cannot establish whether cost-consciousness influences actual costs of patient care.
Our main independent variables of interest were three health worker measures: concentration of doctors, concentration of nurses and midwives and aggregate concentration of health workers (doctors, nurses and midwives) per 1000 population [ 17, 21, 30].
To investigate the role of co-morbidity in determining barriers to care, we used a self-reported measure of doctor-diagnosed diabetes (Have you ever been told by a doctor that you have diabetes or sugar in the blood' – Yes/No).
Main outcome measures Two measures of a doctor's professional performance using patient and colleague questionnaires from the United Kingdom's General Medical Council (GMC).
Our findings are consistent with a recent study that analysed direct measures of junior doctor activity to show that newly qualified staff took less time to complete non-urgent tasks than those who were 1 year more experienced, but longer to complete urgent tasks.
This research suggests that the most informative measures for doctors may be estimates of the post-test probability of disease (predictive value), which can be presented as a range corresponding to different pre-test probabilities.
2 Model adjusted by country-specific measures including number of doctors per 100,000 people, percent of children immunized for measles, female disability-adjusted life expectancy in years, percent of female adult illiteracy rate, percent of infants with low birth weight, and major geographic region.
