A multilevel perspective of patients and general practitioners

One of the conclusions of this thesis is that general practitioners hold to the guidelines regarding the prescribing of medication. The data of patients and general practitioners were analyzed making use of the multilevel method. This method is related to the way in which the data of patients and general practitioners are brought together in one analysis, viz. patients are nested under general practitioners. As well the structure of the data as the structure of the research questions concern two populations, those are patients and general practitioners. Examples of these research questions are the relation between the prescribing of medication and the adherence to guidelines, or the relation between the workload of the general practitioner and the patient in his environment. Comparing the variation of the prescribing of the general practitioners with the variation of patients, it turned out that there were no significant differences between the general practitioners. The multilevel method is preferred to the classic analysis of variance because fewer assumptions have to be made. The expectation is that this technique will be used more frequently in the near future because this multilevel technique implies a lot of advantages and a large number of applications.