Background: As in other countries, there is concern and some fragmentary evidence that GPs' central role in the Swiss healthcare system as the primary provider of care might be changing or even be in decline. Our study gives a systematic account of GPs' involvement in accident care from to and identifies changes in GPs' involvement in this typical field of primary care: how frequently GPs were involved along the care pathway, to what extent they figured as initial care provider, and what their role in the care pathway was.
Methods: Using a claims dataset from the largest Swiss accident insurer with two million accident cases, we constructed individual care pathways, i. We calculated probabilities for the involvement of various care provider groups, for initial care provision, and for the role of GPs in patients' care pathways, adjusted for injury and patient characteristics using multinomial regression.
While involvement stayed at about the same level for accidents occurring from to , the share of accidents where GPs provided initial care decreased by 4 percentage points.
GPs' involvement in accident care is higher in rural compared to urban regions, among elderly compared to younger patients, and among Swiss compared to non-Swiss citizens. Conclusions: GPs play a key role in accident care with considerable variation depending on region and patient profile. From to , there is a remarkable decline in GPs' provision of initial care after an accident. This is a strong indication that the GPs' role in the Swiss healthcare system is changing.
Abstract Background: As in other countries, there is concern and some fragmentary evidence that GPs' central role in the Swiss healthcare system as the primary provider of care might be changing or even be in decline. Publication types Research Support, Non-U.
