Motives for early retirement of self-employed GPs in the Netherlands: a comparison of two time periods.

Background: The high cost of training and the relatively long period of training for physicians make it beneficial to stimulate physicians to retire later. Therefore, a better understanding of the link between the factors influencing the decision to retire and actual turnover would benefit policies designed to encourage later retirement. This study focuses on actual GP turnover and the determining factors for this in the Netherlands.

[Entry into general practice training: no relation with focus on primary care in the undergraduate curriculum].

Objective: To investigate differences between medical faculties in the proportion of graduates entering general practice (GP) training, and to analyse whether this is related to the degree of orientation towards general practice of Dutch medical undergraduate curricula.

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Methods: Several databases were used to investigate which percentage of medical graduates per faculty entered the GP training programme between 1989 and 2001.

Dying from cancer or other chronic diseases in the Netherlands: ten-year trends derived from death certificate data.

Background: For the further development of palliative care, it is relevant to gain insight into trends in non-acute mortality. The aim of this article is twofold: (a) to provide insight into ten-year trends in the characteristics of patients who died from cancer or other chronic diseases in the Netherlands; (b) to show how national death statistics, derived from physicians' death certificates, can be used in this type of investigations.

Methods: Secondary analysis of data from 1996 to 2006 on the "primary" or "underlying" cause of death from official death certificates filled out by physicians and additional data from 2003 to 2006 on the place of death from these certificates.