What makes a good general practitioner: do patients and doctors have different views?

BACKGROUND General practitioners (GPs) are expected to be responsive to patients' expectations, but patients and doctors may have different views on what constitutes good general practice care. AIM To elicit areas of controversy as well as areas of mutual agreement between the opinions of patients and GPs with regard to good general practice care. METHOD A questionnaire, distributed to 850 patients and 400 GPs, measured which of 40 aspects of general practice care were given priority. A second questionnaire, distributed to 400 different GPs, measured the GPs' perception of the priorities of patients. RESULTS The priority rank order of all 40 aspects was highly correlated for patients and GPs (0.72), as was the rank order of aspects for patients and the perception of them by GPs (0.71). Nevertheless, when comparing the priorities of patients and GPs, 23 out of 40 aspects differed significantly (P = 0.00125) in their rank number. Similarly, when comparing the priorities of patients with the perception of them by GPs, 23 aspects differed significantly. CONCLUSIONS There is great similarity between the priorities of patients and those of GPs. GPs are quite capable of assessing most of the priorities of patients. However, potentially controversial areas of general practice care do exist.