Self-Rooming Patients in Health System?

The Annals of Family Medicine encourages readers to develop a learning community to improve health and health care through enhanced primary care. With the Annals Journal Club, we encourage diverse participants—particularly among students, trainees, residents, and interns—to think critically about and discuss important issues affecting primary care, and even consider how their discussions might inform their practice.¹

HOW IT WORKS

The Annals provides discussion tips and questions related to one original research article in each issue. We welcome you to post a summary of your conversation to our eLetters section, a forum for readers to share their responses to Annals articles. Further information and links to previous Annals Journal Club features can be found on our website.

CURRENT SELECTION

Ramly E, Kamnetz SA, Perry CE, et al. Primary care patients’ and staff’s perceptions of self-rooming as alternative to waiting rooms. Ann Fam Med. 2023;21(1): 46-53.

Discussion Tips

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced United States health care systems to fundamentally change care delivery. In this issue of Annals of Family Medicine, the authors of “Primary Care Patients’ and Staff Perceptioins of Self-Rooming as Alternative to Waiting Rooms” describe the results of a survey that examines patient and staff perceptions about one such change, self-rooming. What can this paper teach us about survey studies and changing patient care processes?

Discussion Questions

• What question is asked by this study and why does it matter?

• How strong is the study design for answering the question?

• What was the survey response rate? Why is the response rate considered important in survey research? Did response rate vary by question? What is missing data and why is it an important concept in many types of research?

• Why did the researchers dichotomize the responses to the survey questions that had ordinal responses? What are the downsides of dichotomizing variables?

• What are the main study findings?

• How might the timing of the survey (ie, during the pandemic) have affected survey responses for patients and clinic staff?

• What could explain the difference among the patients, clinical staff, and non-clinical staff groups for the “prefer self-rooming” questions (Tables 2 and 3 of the article)?

• Do you worry about any response biases with patient and/or staff responses? How might further research into this area detect response bias?

• Are there any other data that might influence whether your clinic would implement self-rooming?

• Do you think self-rooming would work in your clinic? If self-rooming was implemented in your clinic, do you think that patients and staff would feel the same way about it as the respondents to this survey did? How might the characteristics of the study authors’ health care system (eg location, size of clinics, patient population) influenced its ability to implement self-rooming?

• What challenges might your clinic have implementing self-rooming?