Rationale: Moving towards high quality primary health care, involving family physicians in primary care research becomes an essential prerequisite to ensures a better adoption and routinization of patient-centred, evidence-based practices.
Aim: To assess the effectiveness of strategies to engage family physicians in primary care research.
Methods: We systematically reviewed evidence for strategies used to engage family physicians in primary care research. We included any study design that reported at least one quantitative outcome. Searches were carried out on MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO and Web of Science. Pairs of reviewers independently screened for publications in two stages using standardized forms. We performed data analysis through a narrative synthesis approach, using the Reasoned-action approach as framework.
Results: A total of 4859 deduped records were identified of which 41 studies met the eligibility criteria and were included for analysis. The majority of studies (n = 35) investigated family physician's participation in a research project. They aimed to influence family physicians' intention (n = 7) or their ability (n = 3) to participate in a research project. Three types of strategies (compensation/incentive, recruitment by a peer and support from a research network or an academic institution) demonstrated a significant increase in participation rate. Methodological quality of the studies evaluating these strategies was relatively low. Few studies (n = 6) targeted research capacity-building programmes with no significant impact noted.
Conclusion: Numerous strategies have been used to engage family physicians in primary care research, but few studies evaluated their effectiveness in a rigorous way.
Registration: The protocol of this review was registered with the SPOR Evidence Alliance and on the PROSPERO platform (registration number: CRD42020189322).
Keywords: capacity-building; family physicians; primary care; research engagement; review; strategies.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.