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Watch your mail closely in early September-you may be one of 1,500 randomly selected APA members to receive a survey from APA's Office of Research. The second National Survey of Psychiatric Practice (NSPP) will collect data on patient caseload, practice settings, professional work activities, and financial arrangements.
The NSPP is one of the few sources of information on psychiatric practice (in addition to the AMA's Physician Masterfile database and Socioeconomic Monitoring System survey and APA's earlier Professional Activity Survey). Results of the 1996 NSPP have been presented at APA annual meetings, and the data are being used by APA staff and several academic researchers to study various trends within the psychiatric profession such as productivity, workload, the impact of managed care, and practice differences between U.S.-educated and internationally educated psychiatrists. An overview of the findings from the 1996 NSPP appear in the March issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.
According to Harold A. Pincus, M.D., a deputy medical director of APA and director of the Office of Research, "In this era of rapid changes in our health care delivery system, the NSPP allows us to characterize, at the national level, what psychiatrists do and to measure changes over time. This information is critical to inform the national debate on the role of psychiatrists in mental health care."
The 1998 NSPP questionnaire will include 25 to 30 questions, mostly fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice. It will be mailed to a random sample of APA members who have completed their training and who are currently practicing in the United States. Hispanics, African Americans, and psychiatrists 39 years old and younger are being oversampled to ensure that these groups will be adequately represented in the survey.
Funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the survey will be conducted and analyzed by the Office of Research in collaboration with the APA Practice Research Network (PRN). The survey methods and instrument were designed in consultation with a group of mental health researchers and clinicians. The survey instrument was pretested by a group of PRN members.
The Office of Research will conduct the survey every other year in order to collect enough data to study trends in the profession over time. "Data collected through the 1996 NSPP gave us a snapshot of different dimensions of mental health care delivery and financing," said Deborah Zarin, M.D., an APA deputy medical director and director of the Office of Quality Improvement and Psychiatric Services. "With the 1998 NSPP, we will now have the data necessary to start making these comparisons and assess trends in psychiatric practice."
Prompt responses from those chosen to complete the questionnaire are critical. "The ability of this survey to provide information on issues affecting psychiatrists greatly depends on the level of response obtained," said Zarin. "If selected to participate in this survey, we ask that you help us accomplish the goals of this very important study by promptly completing and returning the questionnaire."