To the Editor: During a recent year-long Primary Health Care Research, Evaluation and Development (PHCRED) research fellowship, we encountered all the usual barriers to undertaking good research (funding, time, etc). While privacy legislation has been reported to adversely affect research,1,2 we were unprepared for the time and cost of dealing with the Health Insurance Commission (HIC — now “Medicare Australia”).

Our research involved mailing a survey to Victorian general practitioners. For approved research, the HIC supplies a valuable service in providing representative datasets of randomly selected GPs. This was once a quick and relatively inexpensive process — a boon when conducting research with limited funding. Being the first within our department to use this service since the new privacy laws were introduced, we struck unexpected administrative and financial barriers.

To maintain anonymity of potential respondents, research materials (ie, surveys and plain language statements) must be mailed by the HIC. So, all items must first be forwarded to the HIC, from where they are remailed to respondents. This process raises a number of hurdles:

• materials need to be approved (and altered if required) by the “Privacy” department at the HIC, despite prior approval from a duly constituted university ethics committee;

• there is a limit of two reminder mail-outs (usual protocols for maximising response rates require up to four mail-outs, and inadequate response rates may render research findings unrepresentative and therefore useless); and

• each mail-out is sent with the same HIC covering letter.

Additional requirements lead to an increase in costs — sending envelopes, surveys and plain language statements in bulk to Canberra (numerous times), printing HIC covering letters, and charges for “preparing business rules, extraction specifications, project manage processes to completion . . .”. The list goes on. We were also charged for extraction of the same dataset again for mailing the reminder letter, as more than 2 weeks had elapsed since the original data extraction.

Finally, there is the added time. We estimated this to be around 4 weeks, which is detrimental in a limited fellowship position.

While the people we dealt with at the HIC were helpful and professional, the time and expense were almost overwhelming. We respect the need to protect the privacy of research participants. However, the “side effects” of applying the new privacy laws are having an adverse impact on primary health care research. Let this be a friendly warning to all those about to set off down the research path — excessive red tape is no longer the exclusive domain of practitioners.