Perspectives of Australian general practitioners on shared care for paediatric patients

Abstract

Australian general practitioners (GPS) are seeing proportionally fewer paediatric patients. GPS may be increasingly relying on secondary or tertiary care physicians to provide care to children with complex, chronic conditions. Shared-care initiatives may provide a solution to the apparent increasing dependence of GPS on paediatric specialists, although, currently, evidence is lacking about both the prevalence and composition of shared care for children in Australia. We invited 377 GPS in Melbourne, Australia, who had referred at least two children to specialist paediatric outpatient clinics within the 2014 calendar year, to participate in a mailed survey study. Items analysed for the present..