ABSTRACT
Primary care providers should play a much stronger role in shaping and conducting research in and about their own practice. Primary care providers, who are usually a mix of doctors, nurses and mid-level doctors, are often too busy handling the clinical workload to engage significantly with the research necessary to strengthen and improve primary care. Scientific medicine has traditionally embraced the empirical-analytical research paradigm, and the evidence-based medicine movement has emphasised a hierarchy of such research methods, with the synthesis of evidence from randomised controlled trials in systematic reviews at the pinnacle. Quality improvement cycles are a common method used to engage practitioners with the latest evidence in an approach of action learning that encourages them to reflect on how to improve their practice, make the suggested changes and then evaluate the effect in continuous cycles. The group simultaneously experiments with changing its practice while also observing what happens and learning both individually and collectively.
