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94 Making General Practice Attractive: Encouraging GP attraction and Retention KCE Reports 90
6.3.6 Open-ended comments
In order to have a more precise explanation of the quantitative results on the policies,
the stakeholders had the possibility, during the scoring and ranking of the policies, to
orally express themselves on their choices. The interviewer took notes of those
comments in order to analyze those comments afterwards.
6.4 IDENTIFICATION OF STAKEHOLDERS
This part presents the main steps of the elaboration of the list of stakeholders. The first
section concerns the identification of the stakeholders and is divided into three parts: 1
the definition of groups to which the stakeholders belong, 2 the different steps in the
gathering and the validation of the names, 3 the description of the final sample of
stakeholders.
6.4.1 Groups of stakeholders
To compile the list of stakeholders, a particular attention has been devoted to
individuals or organizations that could either accept or block policy adoption. The list
has been drawn on the basis of previous studies in primary care 210 , 211 , 212 , 213 as well as
in relation with general classification of stakeholders in health studies 214 . Four
stakeholders groups have therefore been first defined as the policymakers, the interests
groups, the media and the GPs themselves. According to Buse 192 the interest groups
themselves can be divided into two subgroups: the sectional and the cause groups. The
result is the definition of five stakeholders groups (see appendix 5.5. for more details):
• The policymakers, who are individuals being formally in charge of
decision-making. This part of the list has been elaborated thanks to the
recent review of the Belgian health care system 194 . The policymakers
are members of the federal bodies e.g., the Federal Public Service of
Health, Food Chain safety and Environment, the National Health
INAMI/RIZIV, the Committee for health and social affairs, etc.
• The sectional group (unions), whose goal is to enhance the interests of
their members. They are constituted of the medical unions, the GP
professional organizations (e.g. SSMG, Domus Medica), the specialists’
professional organizations (paediatricians, gynecology), and the
students associations.
• The cause group (universities), the goal of which is to promote a
particular issue or cause. They are constituted of e.g. the medical
faculties, the academic departments of general practice, the medical
teaching consultative bodies.
• The media, including the following journals: le Journal du Médecin/ De
Artsenkrant, le Généraliste/de Huisarts, Huisarts nu en de Standaard
(this last newspaper has been added because the name of the journalist
responsible for health topics was cited by some stakeholders).
• The GPs. Because the project aims at developing policies to improve
the retention of GPs who are in the practice, a sample of presidents of
GPs’ circles and/or training supervisors has been drawn. On one hand
the presidents of GP circles are an interesting bridge between grass
roots’ GPs and policymakers: they play a central role in the
organization of the general practice at the local level. On the other
hand, the training supervisors make the link between the teaching and
the practice worlds.