Is primary care research important and relevant to GPs?

Abstract

Insufficient investment in primary care services, even in high-income countries, is challenging health systems, for example, through pressures on the primary care workforce from rising workloads, ageing practitioner profiles, and declining interest in primary care careers from young practitioners. Failure to invest in research to guide better practice, raising quality and reducing variations in care, may be a further risk. But is primary care research really that important?\n\nMost biomedical research has historically been centred on basic science and the pursuit of discovery, for example, on the mechanisms of disease and their amelioration. Until latterly, the application of this science was seen merely as a professional responsibility — why don’t practitioners just get on and apply the important findings? But such implementation delays may be more to do with incomplete evidence than clinical inertia, hence one argument for more applied research evidence to inform discovery science.\n\nA century of serial multi-billion-dollar investments in basic and discovery science generated the interventions we use today. But this investment is being challenged by the dawning recognition by health systems that they need a better evidence base to inform the structure and provision of care, and how to apply the findings of much of this extraordinary biomedical science. Despite basic research consuming most of the global health research investment, much of health care remains empirical and non-evidence based. And, even when evidence gives a clear directive on what to do, slow translation into clinical practice may be as often due to uncertainties as to how to apply the data than on professional inertia.\n\nBelated recognition of such barriers to implementation has led to the introduction of a more applied clinical research focus in many countries with developed healthcare systems, such as the NHS, that complements basic science and discovery research. …