A study of family physicians' telephone accessibility

To recruit physicians into a clinical trial on hypertension management, we tried to reach 162 family doctors by telephone: 68.2% of our calls were answered; 22.4% of them raised busy signals; 9.4% were not answered at all. Fewer than half of the doctors came to the phone immediately or returned our first message within a week. We called the majority several times before we finally got to speak to them. A total of 950 calls were eventually placed before we had spoken to each of 161 family doctors person-to-person-5.9 calls per doctor. One physician could not be contacted. It appears, therefore, that family physicians are very well protected against the receipt of unsolicited telephone calls-even from professional colleagues.