Use of focus groups for identifying specialty needs of primary care physicians

✍ Scribed by Mark H. Gelula; Leslie J. Sandlow

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 49 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-1912
• DOI: 10.1002/chp.1340180408

✦ Synopsis

For a new continuing medical education (CME) initiative being undertaken at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, we selected focus groups as a major part of our needs assessment process. We chose focus groups because we wanted to determine what subjects primary care physicians believed would benefit them in their pri-vate practices and as managed care "gatekeepers." We were hoping that primary care physicians would be interested in learning more subspecialty concepts and skills but we were uncertain about that expectation. Focus groups were chosen since they provided an opportunity for multiple discussants to share views in an interview format leading to what we hoped would be immediately useful information.

Review of Literature

Focus groups have been used for over 50 years by social scientists, in marketing, and, more recently, in health care. They were first described by Bog-