CRISP Statement provides important guidelines for Primary Care research

The authors who carried out the mutl-step rigourous work to develop the CRISP statement on consensus reporting for primary care research have done a great service for the research community. Previous guidelines failed to provide sufficient information on context and methods to allow primary care practitioners to determine if the findings applied to their practice settings. The CRISP Checklist is built upon a five-year program of rigorous research that engaged the international interprofessional community. CRISP included as experts both the creators and users of primary care research, including researchers, clinical practitioners, patients, communities, editors, reviewers, educators, policymakers, and funders. One especially important element is recommendation 3(b) which calls for explicit description of how patients and communities were engaged in the research process. The checklist is a practical guide for planning primary care research and judging research proposals as well as for preparing manuscripts.