Hi Su,

It is not clear what you are specifically trying to study here? Are you interested in a patient's satisfaction with pathology services? Are you interested in determining whether patients are more satisfied with those services when referred vs if they were to get them directly (without a referral)?

If patients cannot get pathology services without a referral, I am not sure what you'll gain by asking them about the possibility? After all, it's similar to pharmacy services. Patients require a prescription from a doctor in order to get their prescription filled. Asking patients if they would prefer getting their medications directly without a prescription is a useless endeavor, because (a), they are surely going to respond positively, and (b) nothing is going to change as a result of surveying them.

So the lesson here is that you must first develop your idea to the point where you have thought about exactly what you want to study, and why. Similarly, you need a more global context for your questions, that is, if the environment is set up in certain manner for a reason (referrals are required so that patients don't unilaterally go get them unnecessarily), then your questions will likely find the results you are expecting (yes, change the system so that we patients can get the services without a referral!).

Only after this basic work, should you then consider developing the survey instrument, surveying the population (or sampling) and then analyzing the results.

I hope this helps

Ariel

 This is a bit complicated.

The consumer of pathology seems to be the GP and not the patient.

So you can have two populations in your study here, patients and GP.

But as to the accessibilty.. that will be hard to do seeing as most patients never heard about a pathologist.

Your survey can be a simple one, generally any of those 'customer satisfaction' surveys, but you can tweak it towards healthcare but adding other information, like the patient's need to follow up, and the accuracy of the diagnosis.

This sounds interesting and should be a good project

Let me know if you need further help.

What is this work for, a thesis?

Thanks for your comments. The work is for a professional doctorate thesis and I'm having difficulty actually defining the research question. There are a number of countries where DAT is now available (not Australia) and I'd like to study if this has had positive health outcomes and how Australian pathology consumers feel about it. Do they want DAT? would it be of benefit? how? particularly for those with chronic illnesses who are large users of healthcare services.