Background General practitioner (GP)-led primary care is the linchpin of health care in Ireland. Reflecting international trends, there are increasing concerns about the sustainability of the current Irish GP service due to an increasing workload. Objective data on the duration of GP consultations are currently not available in Ireland. The objective of this pilot study is to demonstrate how the duration of consultations can be collected, using readily available administrative data. Methods Software was developed to extract the duration of GP consultations using the opening and closing of electronic patient records associated with a GP consultation. GP practices (N = 3) comprising 15 GPs were recruited from a university-affiliated research network. A retrospective analysis of GP consultations with patients with diabetes for the 9 years between 2010 and 2018 was used to assess the feasibility of using this system to measure the duration of consultations. Results The average duration of a consultation was 14.1 min for the 9 years spanning 2010 to 2018. Patients had an average time between consultations of 99 days. Conclusions This pilot study confirms that an administrative data set can be utilised at negligible cost to monitor GP practice consultation workload over time. Our preliminary pilot data show that GP consultation durations among participating practices were longer than the 5-11.7 min reported in the UK and show an increase over the period. Clearly, a larger number of practices and patients are required to substantiate this finding.

中文翻译：

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爱尔兰全科医生咨询持续时间的试点研究。

背景 全科医生 (GP) 主导的初级保健是爱尔兰医疗保健的关键。反映国际趋势的是，由于工作量的增加，人们越来越担心当前爱尔兰全科医生服务的可持续性。爱尔兰目前没有关于全科医生咨询持续时间的客观数据。这项试点研究的目的是展示如何使用现成的行政数据来收集协商的持续时间。方法 软件被开发用于使用与 GP 咨询相关的电子患者记录的打开和关闭来提取 GP 咨询的持续时间。包括 15 名 GP 的 GP 实践（N = 3）是从大学附属研究网络中招募的。回顾性分析了 2010 年至 2018 年 9 年间糖尿病患者的 GP 会诊，用于评估使用该系统测量会诊持续时间的可行性。结果 2010年至2018年9年平均就诊时间为14.1分钟。患者平均就诊时间为99天。结论 该试点研究证实，可以以可忽略不计的成本使用管理数据集来监控 GP 实践咨询工作量随着时间的推移。我们的初步试点数据显示，参与实践的全科医生咨询时间长于英国报告的 5-11.7 分钟，并且在此期间有所增加。显然，需要更多的实践和患者来证实这一发现。