Strategies of Collaboration Between General Practitioners and Psychiatrists: A Survey of Practitioners' Opinions and Characteristics

Background:The description of collaboration models and the key underlying principles provide important information for designing services. However, to apply this broad corpus of information to clinical services and policymaking, we need to know which key principles (or strategies) of collaboration are the most accepted by local physicians.Method:In this context, we designed a survey that included 2 objectives: 1) to collect the opinions of practising general practitioners (GPs) and psychiatrists in Montreal with respect to strategies for improving collaboration between these 2 groups and 2) to identify demographic and practice characteristics of those physicians associated with the acceptance of such strategies. We designed a questionnaire to specifically elicit physicians' opinions about strategies involving communication, continuing medical education (CME) for GPs in psychiatry, and access to consulting psychiatrists, as well as to identify the profiles of the respondent physicians. We mailed the questi...