Recruitment of practices in primary care research: the long and the short of it.

Objective: To determine factors that facilitated or hindered recruitment of general practices into a large New Zealand primary care project that aimed to determine general practice characteristics of immunization coverage.

Methods: The project had a multi-level recruitment strategy requiring recruitment of randomly selected practices before randomly selecting GPs, practice nurses and caregivers of children enrolled at those practices. Detailed quantitative and qualitative recruitment data were recorded on an access database.

Determining immunisation coverage rates in primary health care practices: a simple goal but a complex task.

Purpose: To explore the quality of data recording by practices and identify issues to be considered and addressed before such data can be used as a continuous measure of immunisation delivery.

Methods: One hundred and twenty-four randomly selected general practices visited to measure immunisation coverage using the various practice management systems (PMS) in use. To capture all target children it was necessary to build two queries: one generated a list of all children aged between 6 weeks and 2 years who had been to the practice, regardless of enrollment status; the other asked dates and nature of all immunisations given.