Table 2.

Characteristics of projects

Characteristics	GP project	HP project
No of team members	Core team: 10 (4 ICGP, 4 AUDGPI, 2 PCCTNI) Expert panel: 50	27 (20 HTA staff, 4 other HIQA directorate staff, 3 RCSI collaborators)
Work time	Not recorded*	1432.4 days, an average of 2.3 days per staff member per week
Team meetings	Number of meetings: 49 Meetings were daily (6 April 2020 to 3 May 2020), then two to three per week (until 28 June 2020, then weekly. Attendance Range: 4–8 people Mean: 6	Number of meetings: Not recorded. Meetings occurred daily (at a minimum) between small project teams. Attendance varied depending on the size of individual projects and tasks.
No of products	Questions submitted by GPs: 360 Answers posted to website†:126 Answers with updates posted: 42 Podcasts: 3	30 publications Public health and clinical evidence summaries: 21 Reviews of public health guidance: 5 Review of Restrictive Public Policy Measures: 1 Excess mortality analysis: 1 Rapid HTA: 1 HTA scoping report: 1 21 updates of the publications above.
Website views	The ICGP Q&A homepage has been served a total of 21 600 times during the period April - August inclusive.‡ Times podcasts listened to: Podcast 1: 70 Podcast 2: 86 Podcast 3: 104	HIQA unique webpage views: 39 788
GP rating of helpfulness of answers	Answers rated: 65 Median rating: 4.5, (range 1–5, 5 being the best)	Not applicable
Social media engagement on average§ Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Instagram Posts Instagram stories	Not available	Reach 729/Engagement 44 Engagement rate 4%/ Impressions 4357 Engagement 82/ Impressions 2075 Reach 384/Impressions 395 Impression 199

*As the GP project comprised mostly of staff volunteering their time, formal records of time spent were not collated.

†In some cases, multiple questions on the same topic were integrated into one question and answer. Questions dealing with specific patient cases or local operational issues were not answered.

‡A summary produced from the server log associated with the Q&A section of the ICGP website gave an indication of website activity. It is important to note that a server log is a log file created and maintained by a server consisting of a list of activities; it does not collect user-specific information so the logs below are not unique. This summary is from the period April–August inclusive. The term ‘served’ refers to activity of all kind. ‘Served’ does not mean ‘viewed’ or ‘downloaded’.

§The engagement rate quantifies the level of total engagement by total account holders but each platform calculates this rate differently so they are not comparable across platforms. Impressions are the number of times content is displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked.

AUDGPI, the Academic Departments of General Practice in Ireland; GP, General Practice project; HIQA, Health Information and Quality Authority; HP, Health Policy project; HTA, Health Technology Assessment; ICGP, Irish College of General Practitioners; RCSI, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; PCCTNI, Primary Care Clinical Trials Network in Ireland; Q&A, Questions and Answer.