Would you be interested in participating in a study about hospital readmissions…? Experiences with methodological strategies and techniques for recruiting GPs to participate in qualitative research

Abstract

General Practitioners (GPs) are an asset in healthcare research, considering the amount of knowledge they hold about the primary healthcare service. However, GPs have proven difficult to recruit as participants in both quantitative and qualitative research (Asch, Connor, Hamilton, & Fox, 2000; Hummers-Pradier et al., 2008; Parkinson et al., 2015). The difficulties in recruiting GPs have been attributed to their great workload and their perception of a gap between the theory-laden research and their own practical work (Rosemann & Szecsenyi, 2004; Leysen et al., 2019). However, own experiences of recruiting GPs to participate in a qualitative study disclosed that the picture might be more nuanced than described in previous reports.

The objective of this paper is to describe the methodological strategies and techniques for the recruitment process, and discuss the difficulties in recruiting GPs to participate in research and possible reasons for such difficulties. It was based on experiences from a recently conducted study on GPs, which aimed to increase knowledge about the GPs’ role in hospital readmissions from the primary healthcare service (Glette, Kringeland, Røise, & Wiig, 2018).