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. 1989 Sep;35:1776–1778.

Referrals in Primary Care: Is the Family Physician a “Gatekeeper”?

Peter G Norton, Earl V Dunn, David Bestvater
PMCID: PMC2280904  PMID: 21249055

Abstract

The increasing financial restraints on the use of health care resources make it important to examine the appropriateness of present usage patterns. The authors studied referral patterns for a group of academic family physicians practising in a health service organization in Ontario. They found that for all consultant encounters, the family physician directly controlled 65% of these consultations, whereas 13% were continuing consultations with the specialist without direct family physician referral. The remainder were either unknown or referred from other sources, for example, emergency room or specialist-to-specialist referrals. The family physician made the exact same diagnosis as the consultant in 73.4% of cases for which data were available, and the patient was referred to an inappropriate specialist in only 2.7% of cases.

Keywords: health care costs, referrals, specialists

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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