A previously published review on primary care enrolment schemes found substantial variations in their characteristics, each with the potential to affect their ability to ensure people have access to primary care and continuity in their care. For this Review, we developed a typology informed by qualitative analysis of 15 schemes in 12 high-income countries for effective comparisons and informed policy making. We obtained policy documents from the websites of relevant government organisations and used inductive coding and thematic analysis to classify and group the schemes according to their core characteristics. Two distinctive features emerged: whether patients could attend other practices (ie, restricted or unrestricted) and whether there were different types of financial or non-financial incentives to enrol or attend enrolled practices, resulting in eight clusters of enrolment types. The identified typologies can assist researchers and policy makers in comparing and interpreting outcomes reported in the literature on patient enrolment schemes, including their impact on continuity of care. This study is particularly relevant to primary care reforms considering patient enrolment.
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Bates et al. (2025) studied this question.