Thus, data from the literature might not fully reflect the current problems of practising healthcare providers, especially when the information comes from another country with a completely different healthcare system.
Our study assesses an intervention that linked village doctors (a cadre of informal health care providers practising modern medicine) to formal doctors through call centres from the perspective of the village doctors who participated in the intervention.
The study population comprised a total of around 2 140 health-care providers practising in the 123 centres (out of a total of 165) that are part of the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) primary care network and are fully compliant with MoPH regulatory requirements.
Inclusion criteria for health care providers are: practising within the municipality of Amsterdam, and regularly working with patients with LBP.
Our exploration suggests that the competencies identified in our earlier study [ 9] are not fully practised in providing community care by health providers.
Most providers practise open accounting, showing that the system is truly in crisis, with many suppliers struggling or leaving the sector.
Evidence from NRHM suggests that reshuffled AYUSH providers practise forms of medicine beyond the scope of their training.
For example, nurses who exhibit unprofessional attitudes towards patients needing any reproductive health service should be sanctioned; regular supervision, support and mentoring of student midwives, practising midwives, and all health providers (in relation to abortion care) by superiors is essential and performance appraisal is also beneficial.
There also appears to be a preference amongst GPs for referral to other GPs practising CAM therapies, rather than referral to non-medically trained CAM providers, such as naturopaths [ 16].
Practitioners will be excluded if they are not current primary care providers, e.g. specialists or retired practitioners, are not practising within the study area, or the practitioner details are not sufficient to contact them regarding the study.
