Evaluating your practice.

In this series you have learnt about research as it applies to researchers in general practice. You have seen how a research question is defined, examined how to search the medical literature to discover what is known about the topic, seen the use of qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection and had explained to you some of the problems of data collection and analysis. As an active GP you may have found the topics interesting, but who has time for research? This final article in the series is titled 'Evaluating your own practice'. Every day you carry out this activity. Simple items like how long do your patients wait, or is there enough money earned to cover expenses? These are things you have been evaluating for a long time. You are an expert at evaluating many aspects of your practice. What I want to try and do in this brief article is to show you how knowledge of research approaches can help you by making it easier to carry out an evaluation and arrive at more accurate conclusions.