Tool for Validation of the Network of Sentinel General Practitioners in the Belgian Health Care System

Morbidity registration by a network of sentinel general practitioners (SGPs) in Belgium raises a number of problems related to possible biases in the network procedure, such as unequal geographical distribution, non-participation of asegment of the target population of practitioners and difficulties in the estimation of the denominator population at risk for the health problems under study. Through the application of two hierarchical clustering procedures, the initial number of 43 districts in the country has been reduced to 15 homogeneous district clusters. These represent the new geographica... Mehr ...