General Practitioners' Propensity to Cooperate With Other Health Professionals in the Management of Patients With Multimorbidity and Polypharmacy: A Cross-sectional Study.

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p><jats:bold>Background.</jats:bold> Cooperation between general practitioners (GPs) and other health professionals appears to help reduce the risk of adverse events linked to polypharmacy for patients with multimorbidity. We investigated the existence of different GP profiles according to their opinions and behaviors about such cooperation and studied the association between these profiles and the GPs’ characteristics and deprescribing behaviors.<jats:bold>Methods. </jats:bold>Between May and July 2016, we performed a cross-sectional survey in a panel of French GPsabout their management of patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy, focusing specifically on their opinions of healthcare professionals’ roles and interprofessional cooperation. We used an agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis to identify GP profiles and then multivariable logistic regression models to study their associations with these doctors' characteristics and deprescribing behaviors.<jats:bold>Results.</jats:bold> We identified four profiles of GPs according to their cooperation propensities: GPs from the “intensive” profile (14%) were favorable to cooperating with various health professionals, including delegating some prescribing tasks to pharmacists; GPs from the "moderate" profile (47%) had favorable opinions about health professionals’ roles, except for this specific task delegation; GPs from the "selective" profile (27%) tended to work only with physicians; GPs from the "low cooperation" profile (12%) didn’t appeared interested in cooperation. These profiles were associated with different professional characteristics.<jats:bold>Conclusions. </jats:bold>Current health policies encourage interprofessional cooperation for the management of patients with multimorbidity. Our study provides information for understanding disparities among GPs regarding working with other professionals who deal with their patients and suggests possible ways to improve cooperation.</jats:p>