This study uses daims data from a provincial health care insurance plan to examine the ability of certain physician and practice characteristics to predict compliance with thyroid function testing (TFT) guidelines. The characteristics examined are the practitioner's gender, year of birth, university or country of graduation, type of practlce (solo or clinic), location of practice (metropolitan, urban, or rural), geographical area of practice (census division). CCFP certification, patient caseload, and proportion of patient caseload tested for thydroi functioning. This study found significant variation in the degree of compliance wlth TFT guidelines. On average, physician-ordered thyroid function tests complied wlth guidelines only 37% of the time. Very little of the variation (approximately 7%) was explained by the characteristics examined. Although the explanatory power of this model was low, oertain characteristics appear to contribute to better compliance. They are: being male, practicing in the southern third of the province, practicing in an urban location, having CCFP certification, and testing proportionately more of one's patient caseload for thyroid functioning. The results of this study suggest that physicians require better training regarding TFT and that further research should be done to understand the marked differences in compliance by gender and geographic location.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.68219 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | McKechnie, Joanne |
| Contributors | Bailar, John (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001397252, proquestno: AAIMM94477, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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