Consultation length: author response to Dr Brigid Joughin

Thank you for your response.¹ We were also surprised at the lack of correlation between consultation and patient experience and patient satisfaction. In reference to your first point, the national GP–patient survey questionnaire communication items that we used in the study ask the patient specifically about whether they feel they had enough time in the consultation.² We conducted separate analyses to investigate whether there was any relationship between this item and consultation length, and found no evidence of an effect. There has been some interesting work conducted about patient perceptions of time in general practice by Ogden and colleagues.³ She found that, overall, patients tended to underestimate the time spent with their doctor. She also measured the preferred time post-consultation and found that patients would have preferred longer with their GP. We agree it would be interesting to study patients’ estimations of how much time they think they will need before the consultation.

With regards to your second point, we suspect you are correct in your hypothesis that there may be a stronger correlation. Unfortunately this is not something we measured as part of this study, although we did ask GPs to complete the same communication scale as patients and compared ratings of GPs and patients in the same consultation. We will be reporting these findings in a separate article. Essentially we found that GPs tended to be more self-critical, compared with patients, which may give an indication of the direction of the hypothesis you suggest.