The impact of continuity on mortality in four common and chronic diseases in general practice

BJGP Interviews

In this episode, we talk to Dr Sahar Pahlavanyali, a doctor and PhD candidate based at the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Title of paper: Continuity and breaches in GP care and their associations with mortality for patients with chronic disease: an observational study using Norwegian registry data

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2023.0211

There is a growing body of evidence on advantages of continuity, and a GP personal list is believed to be one of the positive measures to improve continuity, though not much researched. In a Norwegian setting with GP personal lists, we investigated the associations between GP continuity and mortality for patients with different chronic diseases. Our results showed that lower GP continuity was associated with increased risk of death, but the association was not significantly different for patients with the same RGP compared with those with different RGPs. This study suggests that high informational and management continuity provided by a GP personal list might lower and compensate for the adverse effects when changing GP.