When they receive continuity of doctor care, patients:
| Are more satisfied * | Baker and Streatfield (1995) |
| Are more likely to follow medical advice (adherence) | Warren et al (2015) |
| Are more likely to take up offers of personal preventive medicine | O’Malley et al (1997) |
| Are more likely to have a good doctor patient relationship with their GP | Mainous et al (2001) |
| Are more likely to receive good quality of care | O’Connor et al (1998) |
| Are less likely to need to go to A&E * | Brousseau et al (2004) |
| Are less likely to need a hospital admission, ** particularly for ambulatory care sensitive conditions | Barker et al (2017) |
| Are likely to live longer * | Maarsingh et al (2016) |
| Have more cost effective healthcare (including meaning funding available for other things) | Starfield (1994) |
When continuity of doctor care is provided, doctors:
| Have an ‘accumulated knowledge’ about the patient. Doctors use such accumulated knowledge both for diagnosis and to tailor their advice. | Hjortdahl & Borchgrevink (1991) |
| Report that continuity enables them to provide a ‘higher-quality’ care. GPs are then rewarded with more professional satisfaction through doing a better job. | Ridd, Shaw, & Salisbury (2006) |
| Have improved problem recognition and quality of management for long term conditions | Saultz and Lochner (2005) |
| Have reduced conflicts of responsibility , particularly reducing the ‘collusion of anonymity’ where succession of clinicians only deal with what is immediately most pressing | Freeman and Hughes (2010) |
| Contribute to the reduced the use of specialist care, A&E, emergency admissions and outpatient appointments * | Hansen et al (2013) |
| Reduce costs e.g. prescriptions and tests | Weiss and Blustein (1996) |
| Reduce cases of avoidable significant harm | Avery et al (2020) |
A good introduction to continuity is shared by Sir Denis Pereira Gray in the Improving Continuity: The Clinical Challenge (2016
