GPs balance between professional guidelines and time pressure

GPs adhere better to professional guidelines when recommendations in these guidelines are less time consuming. Also recommendations that reduce the likelihood of a follow-up consultation are better followed than those that are not expected to affect follow-up consultations. This appears from a study carried out by researchers of NIVEL and IQ Healthcare, that was published in BMC Family Practice.

Guideline adherence appeared to be more affected by characteristics of the guideline, than by characteristics of individual GPs. Notably, it was found that GPs who adhere less to guidelines were more satisfied with their available time. Guideline recommendations that require an extra time investment are significantly less well adhered to while those that can save time are significantly more often adhered to. When deciding whether or not to act in accordance with the guideline, medical considerations play a central role. Nevertheless, workload also plays a role in this decision. When developing and implementing guidelines, it is recommendable to take achievability and the amount of time that is required to adhere to this guideline into account.  

In the study data were used from the second Dutch National Survey of General Practice. In this survey, information about patients, contacts, diagnoses, interventions, referrals, prescriptions etc. were recorded during one year. For this study, 170,677 decisions were analysed, made by 130 GPs, working in 83 different practices and treating 98,577 patients.   

Collaborative partners
- IQ healthcare 
- RIVM
- Tilburg University