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Table 3 Characteristics to be included in the skill mix analysis

From: Personnel planning in general practices: development and testing of a skill mix analysis method

(1) What should a skill mix method measure?

Needs from patient’s perspective (3–5)

Needs from professional’s perspective (3–5)

Community’s own perspective of its needs (3–5)

Present demand (n.c.)

Future demand (3–5)

Present capacity (n.c.)

Confront demand and supply (3–5)

Forecast effect of changes in patient demand (4/5)

Whether skill mix is generally the solution to health delivery problems (3–5)

Whether there is balance between patients care demand/needs and professionals time resources (3–5)

Task distribution (4/5)

Task overlap among primary care team members (n.c.)

Workload (n.c.)

Importance of each job task for each professional (perspective of the professional) (2–4)

Time spent per task per professional (2–4)

Training needs of health care professionals (n.c.)

(2) On whom should the focus for measuring demand be placed?

Patients of a practice/health care center (n.c.)

Population (n.c.)

Community (n.c.)

Practice and community (3–5)

Special patients groups (elderly, chronically ill, etc.) (n.c.)

(3) Which sources, in particular data, should be used?

Already available data (i.e., medical records) (3–5)

Collect additional data (qualitative or quantitative) (4/5)

Knowledge of the primary health care team (n.c.)

(4) How should demand/need and skill mix be determined?

Based on simplified classification areas of demand/need (e.g., planning or coordinating care, prescribing, guidance in care, etc.) or skill mix (e.g., define core tasks) (3–5)

Based on a very detailed overview of demand/need and skill mix (n.c.)

5) How should demand/need and skill mix be illustrated?

Purely descriptive/reporting (numbers) (n.c.)

Visual overview (e.g., create simple analytic maps, baseline snapshot of practice’s patient population demographics) (3–5)

(6) How important are the particular characteristics of the method?

Expenditure of time (quickly applicable) (3–5)

Practicability (simple to apply) (3–5)

Costs for applying the instrument (n.c.)

7) How important is it that the method enables to:

Identify strengths and weaknesses within a multidisciplinary primary health care team (4/5)

Conduct a comparison between practices (comparative approach) (n.c.)

Forecast demand (n.c.)

Identify health need priorities (n.c.)

Identify health inequalities (2–4)

Interpret practice data (3–5)

Manage workload (n.c.)

Support planning of staffing needs (competencies) (4/5)

Forecast amount of staff required (personnel planning) (n.c.)

Conduct long-term strategic planning (3–5)

Conduct a comprehensive environmental analysis (identify risk factors and causes of ill health, accessibility, efficiency, etc.) (n.c.)

  1. Explanation of scores:
  2. Very important (4 or 5, n = 5); Important (between 3 and 5, n = 15); Less important (between 2 and 4, n = 3); Not important (1 of 2, n = 0); (n.c.) = No consensus (n.o consensus: between 1 and 5, n = 19).