The significance of differences in the distribution and variability in test request rates between GP practices located in rural and urban areas
| Electrolyte profiles | Lipid profiles | PSA | Thyroid profiles | HbA1c | Liver profiles | ACR | Immunoglobulins | |
| pMWU | ||||||||
| 2011–2012 | 0.1 | 0.0004* | 0.01 | 0.009* | 0.3 | 0.03 | 0.4 | 0.2 |
| 2012–2013 | 0.08 | 0.001* | 0.03 | 0.01 | 0.7 | 0.02 | 0.5 | 0.4 |
| 2013–2014 | 0.8 | 0.0097* | 0.02 | 0.07 | 1.0 | 0.3 | 0.5 | 0.4 |
| 2014–2015 | 0.6 | 0.01 | 0.02 | 0.1 | 0.9 | 0.3 | 0.5 | 0.03 |
| 2015–2016 | 0.7 | 0.03 | 0.003* | 0.07 | 0.7 | 0.3 | 0.08 | 0.0096* |
| pFK | ||||||||
| 2011–2012 | 0.4 | 0.5 | 0.03 | 0.2 | 0.6 | 1 | 0.2 | 0.8 |
| 2012–2013 | 0.3 | 0.6 | 0.01 | 0.3 | 0.9 | 0.4 | 0.7 | 0.3 |
| 2013–2014 | 0.2 | 0.6 | 0.06 | 0.03 | 0.5 | 0.7 | 1 | 0.5 |
| 2014–2015 | 0.9 | 0.6 | 0.1 | 0.02 | 0.5 | 0.9 | 0.3 | 0.6 |
| 2015–2016 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.2 | 0.2 | 0.2 | 0.7 | 0.8 | 0.1 |
ACR, albumin/creatinine ratio; GP, general practitioner; PSA, prostate-specific antigen.
pMWU, the Mann Whitney U p-value assessing differences in distributions of laboratory test rates between rural and urban practices. pFK, the Fligner-Killeen p-value referring to the significance level of differences in variances. In both cases, the Bonferroni-corrected p<0.01 was considered statistically significant (*). Bonferroni-corrected significance cut-off of α <0.01 was established by dividing the family wise error probability pfwe <0.05 by the number of tested associations that is, five measurements over time.