Attitudes to the public release of comparative information on the quality of general practice care: qualitative study

This paper on quality of care in general practice begins as follows:

Objectives: To examine the attitudes of service users, general
practitioners, and clinical governance leads based in primary care trusts
to the public dissemination of comparative reports on quality of care in
general practice, to guide the policy and practice of public disclosure of
information in primary care.

I read this about six times and failed to understand it. What are service
users? Patients? The public? or just people? Is the word ‘leads’ in
‘clinical governance leads in primary care trusts’ used as a noun (as in
‘put that dog on its lead’) or a verb (as in ‘lead kindly light’)?

Eventually I decided that what the authors were trying to say is something
like this:

Objectives: Standards of care in general practice vary widely. If the
variation can be measured, should the results of such measurements be
available to the public? We put this question to general practitioners,
primary care trusts and a small group of people selected from the public.

Incidentally what is the difference between a group (of people) and a
focus-group?

I turned to the opening sentences of other articles published in this
number of the BMJ. All were easy to understand at first reading, even
those on quite recondite subjects, because they were written in plain
English.

The opening sentence of this paper, however, is so obscure, ugly, and
ridden with jargon that most readers will try and fail to understand it
and turn to something else, thereby defeating the aim of the authors to
make their ‘qualitative study’ known. Perhaps what worries me most is
that the editorial staff of the BMJ allowed that opening sentence to be
published.

Irvine Loudon

Competing interests:  
None declared