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In the 1990s the primary focus of medicine was shifted to disease prevention. Accordingly, it became the responsibility of primary-care physicians to educate and counsel the general population not only on disease prevention specifically but health promotion generally as well. Moreover, it was, and is still today, considered important that physicians provide positive examples of health-promotion behaviors to patients. The purpose of this study was to investigate physicians' health-promotion behaviors and to identify the factors that influence them.
We conducted a postal and e-mail survey of the 371 members of the Physician Association of Cheonan City between May 16th and June 25th, 2011. The questionnaire consisted of 18 items, including questions relating to sociodemographic factors, screening tests for adult diseases and cancer, and health habits.
There were 127 respondents. The gender breakdown was 112 men (88.2%) and 15 women (11.8%), and the mean age was 47.8 years. Fifty-nine (46.4%) were family physicians or interns, and 68 (53.6%) were surgeons. Twenty-six percent (26%) were smokers, and 74.8% were drinkers; 53.5% did exercise; 37% had chronic diseases; 44.9% took periodic cancer screening tests, and 72.4% took periodic screening tests for adult diseases.
It was found that general characteristics and other health-promotion behaviors of physicians do not affect physicians' practice of undergoing periodic health examination.
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Analysis of outpatient visits to primary care offers essential data for residency training by understanding 'reasons for encounter (RFE).' This study was designed to recognize the effect of population aging on demographic characteristics and RFEs.
We included all patients who had visited family practice clinic in Kyung Hee University Hospital in Seoul during each first 5 working days of September, October, and November in 2001 and 2008. New patients included those who hadn't visited within the last 6 months or more. Information on each patient's age, sex, and reason for encounter was obtained from the electronic medical record. The RFEs were compared using International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC)-2-E.
Mean age of overall outpatients was 50.5 and 52.4 years in 2001 and 2008 respectively. The number of new outpatient visits increased from 215 (21.3%) to 326 (29.7%) between 2001 and 2008 (P < 0.001) along with the number of patients aged 65 or more from 7.4% to 12.0% (P = 0.08). Mean age of established patients was 52.5 and 56.9 years (P < 0.001), and the patients aged 65 or more was 14.1% and 35.8% (P < 0.001) in 2001 and 2008 respectively. Analysis by ICPC-2-E revealed a decrease in chapter A in 2008 (P = 0.03) and an increase in chapter F, L, and X (P = 0.01, 0.003, <0.001). Component 1 had increased (P = 0.01), and component 2 had decreased (P = 0.04) in proportion.
Changes in population composition have brought a shift of the distribution of age in outpatients, more significantly in follow-up patients. Comparison by ICPC-2-E showed changes in RFEs of new patients between 2001 and 2008.
It is important to know the current level of primary care performance in order to evaluate and plan for desirable health policy. We tried to compare patient's assessment of primary (family physician, general practitioner, internist, pediatrician, and general surgeon) and non-primary (the other specialties) care physicians.
Study subjects were physicians of primary care clinics in Seoul. The study subject evaluators were Seoul citizens who were selected by a list-assisted random digit dialing sampling method and who had visited their primary care clinic on six or more occasions over a period of more than 6 months as a usual source of care. The modified version of the Korean Primary Care Assessment Tool was used for the evaluation of primary care performance. The data were collected with the aid of a computer-assisted telephone interview system from June 29 to July 22, 2009.
The data on 260 individuals were used for analysis. The mean scores of primary and non-primary care physician group were respectively 1.19 and 0.85 in the comprehensiveness domain, 1.00 and 0.83 in the coordination domain, 1.54 and 1.31 in the family/community orientation, and 1.24 and 0.99 as an average of 3 domains above. The scores in the comprehensiveness domain and the average of 3 domains were significantly higher in the primary than in the nonprimary care physician group.
Primary care physicians showed superior performance compared to non-primary care physicians in comprehensiveness domain and in the average of comprehensiveness, coordination, and family/community orientation domains.
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