General practitioners' attitudes towards research in general medicine

Abstract

Introduction: General medicine is a specific scientific discipline and research is a constituting part of each medical discipline. Objective: We reviewed general physicians` (GPs) attitudes towards scientific research and their reasons for participating or not participating in them. Method: We made a specific questionnaire for the sake of this research. We got the data on age, gender, service periods, place of work (city/country), and specialty: GP or specialist in general medicine, as well as their opinions on research. We forwarded the questionnaire to 550 physicians' email addresses in November 2016. The acquired data were statistically processed using SPSS 20.0 for Windows. Results: The questionnaire was filled out by 233 physicians, of whom 83,3% were women, 67% specialists in general medicine, 68,7% physicians worked in city clinics; the average age of the participants was 46.46±10.29, the average service period 17.85±10.99 years. Out of the total number, 67.8% of the participants thought research was important and useful, even more so by specialists in general medicine, which was statistically significant (p=0.000). There were 71.2% of the physicians who already participated in the research projects, mostly working in the cities (p=0.008), physicians older than 50 (p=0.000), and physicians with service period >20 years (p=0,000). Physicians 30 or younger (p=0.017) and physicians with ≤ 10 years of service (p=0.002) thought research improved work quality. The most frequent reason for not participating in the research projects was lack of time due to a patient and administration overload. The most frequent reason for participating, for physicians with 11-20 and over 20 years of service, was improving work quality (p=0.007). Conclusion: Physicians think research is necessary and useful in general medicine and it improves work quality. The most frequent reason for not participating in the research projects was lack of time due to a patient and administration overload.