Improving access to primary care: the impact of a quality-improvement strategy

Feedback and practice-based improvement plans were a stimulus to work on and to improve accessibility and availability. All practices started improvement plans, but the overall effect of the changes was modest. This may be due to acceptable accessibility and availability before the intervention was introduced and to the time period of 5 months, which seemed to be too short to complete all practice-based improvement plans. The mystery patient was more satisfied with the accessibility than the real patients. This may be related to our concept of accessibility. We learned that adding a mystery patient for data collection can contribute to more objective measurements of practice accessibility than patient questionnaires alone.