Short summary

The drug prescription in general practice is in some cases only slowly adapted to new or changed national recommendations. The risk is that patients will not receive the state-of-the-art treatment that has the greatest effect and/or has the fewest side effects. In a rapidly changing environment, it is important that measures are in place to support the ongoing quality development in general practice. International experiences of professional cluster collaborations serve as inspiration for the new quality improvement tool for GPs in Denmark, quality clusters. The implementation of this resource demanding, and highly complex intervention calls for empirical studies to document their effects.

Rationale

General practice plays a key role in the Danish health care system and is therefore an important partner in the efforts to reach the political goals of improving the overall healthcare quality in Denmark. Systematic quality improvement of general practice has been on

the political agenda for many years, and several different strategies have been rolled out. Recently there has been invested resources in a new model where GPs meet in professional collaboratives called quality clusters (QC). The QCs serves as a forum for the GPs to evaluate their clinical practice by discussing and comparing clinical data.

Using both health and social science methods we will analyze the effects of this new tool for quality improvement in general practice. In order to achieve a more valid picture of the study object, we triangulate data collection with a combination of interviews, questionnaires, and secondary data from Danish health care and social registries in the study.

Description of the cohort

General practitioners in Denmark 

Data and biological material

Questionnaire 

Collaborating researchers and departments

Research Unit of General Practice, Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark,5000 Odense C, Denmark 

• Professor, Dorte Ejg Jarbøl
• Professor, Jens Søndergaard.

DaCHE –  Danish Centre for Health Economics Research, Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark, 5000 Odense C, Denmark

• Assistent professor, Line Bjørnskov Pedersen

Research Unit of General Practice, Department of Public Health, Copenhagen University, Denmark, 1014 Copenhagen, Denmark

• Assistent professor, Marius Brostrøm Kousgaard