Finally . . . an evidence-based tool to find primary health care evidence

To the Editor: If primary health care is to maximise its contributions to population-based outcomes, there must be optimal capacity to retrieve the evidence so critical to informing Australian policy and practice.1 We report a tool called the PHC (Primary Health Care) Search Filter, which retrieves the underlying corpus of relevant published literature in MEDLINE. The PHC search filter was developed using established research methods, incorporating a gold standard comparison approach.2 This useful and simple search tool offers a sophisticated mechanism for retrieving relevant documents pending the development of operational machine-based filtering.