View article

We are grateful to Mitchell and Hardy for highlighting their recent publication in Psychiatric Services. 1 We agree that we should have cited this paper, but we were unaware of it (possibly because it was published around the same time that we were preparing our manuscript for submission). For this omission we unreservedly apologise.

However, we do not entirely agree that our UK-wide comparisons of QoF data were “almost identical” to their work. Although there are obviously some similarities in these papers because both made use of the same publicly-available QoF databases, our paper is different in a number of important regards. These differences are perhaps more evident on reading the full-length online version of our paper, which runs to eight pages, five tables of data and 53 references.