Contacting the questionnaire respondents who are willing to be interviewed is a task which extends beyond my availability of time.  For every person who I have made contact with there seems to be two people who are not in.  Many are repeatedly not in within the normal working day, they need to be rung early evening when they get home  from work. This creates a host of new issues, at the end of my day at the surgery I seem to fail to have the energy and will to start telephoning people, yet it needs to be done.  Ringing respondents/patients from home does not seem right for a variety of reasons - ringing patients is what you do from the surgery, providing access to my home number by dialling 1471 etc. also makes me feel uneasy........but I need to contact these people in response to their willingness to be interviewed.......and this is the just the shortlisted group of 46 from whom I need to select my 30 interviews.  What about the other 131 who are willing to be interviewed but who I do not need to interview?  To telephone all this group is an unmanageable task, so we (PhD supervisors and I) have agreed to send them a postcard in an envelope thanking them etc.  This has now become something achievable - I have had postcards printed and put a suitable message on the back and they were posted today.  Hopefully, the recipients will find the postcard not only an agreeable form of contact but also an appreciation of their participation in the study.

Feedback from patients and interviewees has been incredibly supportive; there seems to be a universal view that it is research which is really worthwhile, that it is research into an area of health that perhaps has not been high profile, an area that is distressing for individuals to talk about but at the same time has a cathartic effect once they have.