Authors' response to: primary healthcare factors and hospital admission rates for COPD: no association

We thank White and Jamieson for their comments1 on our 2011 Thorax paper on associations with admission rates for COPD.2 White and Jamieson appear to be confused about the practice population measures we used. If that is because we referred to the variable concerned too loosely in our correspondence with them we apologise. However as table 4 of our paper demonstrates, the only general practitioner (GP) supply variable used in the analysis, at either primary care trust or practice levels, was GPs/100 000 practice population. We do not agree with their statement that COPD admissions/100 000 GP-registered population includes an adjustment for practice list size, as it is purely a measure of the incidence rate in a population. We included practice list size (which is not a measure of supply) as an independent variable, but it was later dropped in the multivariable analysis stepwise variable selection. We agree...

Source: Thorax - May 14, 2014 Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Soljak, M., Calderon-Larranaga, A., Bell, D., Majeed, A. Tags: PostScript Source Type: research