2003 Boots/RCGP Research Paper of the Year

[摘要] The RCGP & Boots The Chemists are once again delighted to be able to present an excellent paper as the 2003 Research Paper of the Year. The paper ‘The duration of acute cough in pre-school children presenting to primary care: a prospective cohort study’,1 by Alastair Hay, Andrew Wilson, Tom Fahey and Tim Peters, published in Family Practice, has all the characteristics we look for — originality, rigour, and relevance to general practice. It shows several things which are well known to academic primary care, but often go unnoticed by research funders and clinicians; first, that good research in general practice relies on strong practice-based research networks, where access to, and recruitment of, large numbers of patients can be relied upon. Secondly, that the least fashionable and most common conditions are still worth re-examining, because many of our working assumptions are inaccurate. Thirdly, that there is now a long tradition of primary care epidemiology, with similar studies going back 40 years including John Fry's Profiles of disease (1966),2 Howie and Hutchison's paper (1978),3 Howie and Bigg's paper (1980)4 and Toop, Howie and Paxton's paper (1986),5 which remind us that primary care research is now a well established field.

[学科分类] 卫生学