Operational failures in general practice: An observational study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Operational failures in general practice: An observational study of what general practitioners do and what gets in the way of doing it
IRAS ID
233512
Contact name
Carol Sinnott
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Cambridge
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
General practitioners face increasing workloads and pressures. Yet the precise content of their work remains surprisingly poorly understood, as does what gets in the way of task completion. Describing what it is that GPs do, and the operational failures that disrupt their work, is the focus of this project.
Much research exists on operational failures in hospital settings. These failures are defined as instances where an employee does not have the supplies, equipment, information, or people needed to complete a work task. Examples include finding no thermometer probe covers in stock; having to walk to other wards to find monitoring devices that are missing; and re-ordering medications if incorrect ones are sent to the ward. Resolving an operational failure may only take minutes, but cumulative losses of time are significant.
Far less is known about operational failures in primary care. Yet UK general practice is a setting where workload has increased substantially in recent years. While there has been much discussion about ways to increase the supply of GPs, there has been far less attention given to understanding the nature of the tasks that GPs undertake and ensuring these tasks are supported by sound operational systems.
In this project, we will first use qualitative interviews to explore GPs’ experiences of operational failures that interfere with their completion of tasks as intended. We will then conduct an observational time-and-motion study in a sample of practices in the NHS to generate information on the tasks encountered by GPs throughout their working day, including the operational failures that interfere with completion of these tasks. We will determine the proportion of GPs’ time that these operational failures consume. We will use our findings to identify the operational failures that are tractable to improvement work and propose which kinds of improvement strategies might be most appropriate.REC name
London - Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/LO/1949
Date of REC Opinion
16 Nov 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion