The number of general practitioners (GPs) per inhabitant, used commonly as an indicator of primary care (PC) access, reports only imprecisely on the true availability of GPs. The aim of this study is to develop a new PC access indicator that better reflects the availability of GPs to take care of patients at the population level, the average GP time availability per inhabitant per year.
We extracted the data from the Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Primary Care Physicians conducted in 2015, including 11 Western countries and 12,049 randomly drawn GPs. We built the indicator by combining two questions about weekly workload in hours and percentage of time spent on face-to-face contact with patients. The indicator was then adjusted regarding the number of GPs, the weeks worked per year and the country's population size.
On average, GPs worked 43 h a week. The average time spent on face-to-face contact with patients was 30.5 h/week (35 h including emails and telephone contact), ranging from 22 h in Sweden and 38 h in France. The mean time available of GPs for face-to-face contact was 69 min/inhabitant/year, ranging from 38 min in Sweden to 118 min in Australia. Including email and telephone contact, the mean contact time rose to 79 min/inhabitant/year, ranging from 48 min in Sweden to 127 min in Australia.
The new indicator provides an accurate and sensitive estimate of a GP's true time availability at the population level. Results should be interpreted in the context of PC workforce organization, which may help guide GP workforce development.