Charity GP Monitor

What is the Charity GP Monitor?

GPs are a key group for many medical and disability charities because they act as the gatekeeper to medical services. A GP’s attitude towards and knowledge of a particular condition can be absolutely critical to a patient’s experience of the medical process. If a GP believes that hearing loss is an acceptable part of growing old, then they’ll be reluctant to refer them on for a hearing aid fitting. If a GP is unaware of the latest advances in cancer treatment or asthma care, their patient may not get the best that is available.

It is because GPs play such an important role in the medical process that nfpSynergy is carrying out research in order to better understand GPs’ current level of contact with the voluntary sector in general and specific charities in particular.

The first wave of GP research took place in May 2001.  Questions were framed in such a way that we could gather information for a number of charities at the same time thus reducing each individual charity’s costs.  All organisations that signed up were specifically prompted and the illness/condition of their choice was also specified. We conducted the second wave of research in June 2003, and the third wave in December 2005 when we had five participants - Breast Cancer Care, Breakthrough Breast Cancer, Diabetes UK, MS Society and National Childbirth Trust.

 The next wave of research is taking place in 2007. Please get in touch with us if you'd be interested in taking part.

Research Partner

The research partner is a Gfk Healthcare, a leading market research agency with specialist knowledge of researching healthcare professionals.

The cost of the GP monitor ranges from £2,500 plus VAT for a sample size of 200 GPs to £3,500 plus VAT for 400 GPs. Individual questions specific to participant charities are welcome (not included in the costing).

Questions

Questions asked of the GPs will be a combination of spontaneous, open-ended questions and prompted recall, specific to the individual charities taking part. The sample size is 200 GPs (but this can be increased to 400 with a concomitant increase in costs).

In addition to broad questions all participants will get their name prompted in the question: ‘Have you had contact with X charity in the last 6 months?’ And in 'What was your overall impression of the effectiveness of the contact that this charity had with you?’

Participants will also get the condition, disability or illness of their choice included in questions: ‘Thinking about each of the following conditions or illnesses …(dependent on which charities sign up)…to what extent do you feel adequately equipped to provide patients with the information they need?’.

More information

For more information about this research please contact Joe Saxton.