GP Awareness of Broadband Benefits

According to research released from NOP Broadband this week, while some 81% of UK General Practitioners claim awareness of what broadband means and see many advantages for using broadband to improve the way they work, they are yet to be convinced that these benefits should be extended to improve the patient experience of general practices.

36% of English GPs were also not aware of the Prime Minister's commitment to get all English GP surgeries connected to broadband by 2005.

Andy Mayer, NOP Group Business Analyst said: 'GPs are at the front line of the National Health Service's relationship with patients. While it is excellent news for Broadband Britain that so many are broadband aware and looking forward to a more productive use of the Internet, the NHS has much to do to win them over to spreading those benefits to the patients.'

The most important perceived benefits to their practice and patients were:

• Reduced surfing time when researching on the Internet 75%
  
• Faster access to test results and medical records 74%
  
• Greater reliability of connection 61%
  
• Frees up the telephone line 57%.

The least important were:

• Allowing patients to access their own medical records 49%
  
• Enabling patients to pre-book appointment times 38%
  
• Access to higher quality research 29%
  
• More likely to share best practice with others 25%.

Other benefits that received a broadly warm to indifferent response were greater security, access to online training, access to high quality images such as x-ray scans, video conferencing, potential cost savings and e-prescribing.

Mayer concluded: 'This research reinforces the views of the Broadband Stakeholder Group that amongst end users broadband is a higher quality Internet experience first and revolution in the way we do business or deliver public services second.'

NOP Broadband, a division of NOP World, conducted 101 on-line interviews with UK GPs from December 13-16th using GPNet, the UK's leading GP omnibus panel. The intention is to repeat these questions to measure evolving attitudes on a monthly basis.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

• NPD Group
• All news

Register (free) for Daily Research News

Simple printable version of this article

Email this article to a friend