Primary care research — what in the world is going on?

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Primary care research has been described as a "lost cause", and, although this claim has been strongly refuted, general practitioners publish less research than their colleagues in surgery, medicine and public health. Despite a fivefold increase in Australian general practice research papers from the 1980s to the 1990s, fewer than half of these focused on clinical topics. Trying to establish a global figure for expenditure on general practice and primary care research is difficult, but data show that public expenditure for primary care research is minimal in Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom--fewer than 1.50 dollars per capita in 2002-2003. Compared with hospital- and laboratory-based research, primary care receives significantly fewer resources, ranging from 3.2% of total public expenditure on health and medical research in the Netherlands to 6.8% in New Zealand. Government-led investment in interventions such as strengthening primary care departments and colleges and supporting primary care academics, establishing practice-based networks, fostering international initiatives for cross-national efforts, and engaging individual primary care practitioners in research projects, are all required to build research capacity in primary care.