General practice care in nine European countries: Each general practitioner recorded age, sex, number of years in the practice, number of practitioners and other care providers in the practice, and urbanization level of the practice. None of the associations was found consistently in all countries. Patients favour small practices and full-time general practitioners, which contradicts developments in general practice in many countries. Availability of the primary medical care team 24 hours a day is a core public demand, a demand that can only increase if the responsibility for patient care shifts from secondary to primary care.
Personal continuity of care is highly valued by patients [ 2 — 4 ], but it requires that the care provider is available for patient care most of the time.
It has been suggested that the ideal of personal continuity in general practice should be replaced by that of organizational continuity [ 5 ]. Personal continuity of care may be difficult to maintain, given the increasing number of GPs in larger health care organizations. In this paper we examine how patients in different countries evaluate the availability of general practice care.
Previous research has shown that patients are more satisfied with general practice if they have a personal GP and if they experience short waiting times [ 5 , 7 , 8 ]. Different types of out of hours services have proved to be satisfactory for providers, but less satisfactory for patients [ , 6 , 9 ].
Free flow of patients and administrative barriers might be damaging for the quality of care [ 10 ]. We expected to find that patients were more satisfied with the availability of general practice care if their GP worked more hours per week, if their GP had more years experience in general practice, and if their GP worked in a practice with few or no other GPs or care providers.
