How to Do Primary Care Research

This practical ‘How To’ guide talks the reader step-by-step through designing, conducting and disseminating primary care research, a growing discipline internationally. The vast majority of health care issues are experienced by people in community settings, who are not adequately represented by hospital-based research. There is therefore a great need to upskill family physicians and other primary care workers and academics to conduct community-based research to inform best practice. Aimed at emerging researchers, including those in developing countries, this book also addresses cutting edge and newly developing research methods, which will be of equal interest to more experienced researchers.

Felicity Goodyear-Smith is a general practitioner and academic head of the Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. She and Professor Bob Mash co-edited the companion book to this current title: ‘International Perspectives in Primary Care Research’, CRC Press, 2016. She is Chair of the WONCA (world family doctors) Working Party on Research, and both books have been written on behalf of WONCA. She also chairs the International Committee of the North American Primary Care Research Group. Felicity was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Primary Health Care. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers as well as a number of books and book chapters.

Felicity is passionate about the importance of research underpinning clinical practice in primary care. As well as her own research projects and those of her graduate students, she is actively engaged in research capacitybuilding globally, especially in low- and middle-income countries. This current book is particularly for emerging researchers, written as a ‘how to’ guide to conducting primary care research.

Bob Mash graduated from The University of Edinburgh and trained as a general practitioner in Scotland before emigrating to South Africa in 1991. He worked in the townships outside Cape Town with community health workers, providing community based primary care in the final days of the apartheid era. Following the onset of democracy, he worked for 10 years in the public sector, providing primary care in Khayelitsha. During this period, he worked with Stellenbosch University to create the first learning opportunities in family medicine and primary care for undergraduate medical students. Subsequently, he also developed a new online master’s degree programme for the training of family physicians.

He obtained his PhD on mental disorders in primary care in 2002 and has now published over 150 articles in peer reviewed scientific journals. He is currently the head of Family and Emergency Medicine at Stellenbosch responsible for research activities and training at both master’s and doctoral levels. He is the editor-in-chief of the African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine and is a rated researcher with the National Research Foundation. He is a founding member of the Chronic Diseases Initiative for Africa (a network of researchers) and an active leader within the Primary Care and Family Medicine Education (Primafamed) Network, a group of departments of family medicine in sub-Saharan Africa. He is currently the President of the South African Academy of Family Physicians.