Table 1.

Baseline comparison: characteristics.

	Control	Intervention
Number of practices	24	22
Number of patients
Total	l111 216	104 016
Per practice (median)	4277	4573
Range	1779–10 227	1618–10 983
Endoscopy requests
Total	415	414
Ratea per 1000 patients (95% CI)	3.55 (2.98 to 4.24)	3.88 (3.08 to 4.90)
Per practice (median)	18	17
Range	2–43	3–39

^aRate estimated allowing for the cluster randomised design.