Scandinavian journal of primary health care
-
Scand J Prim Health Care · Sep 1985
Why do our patients see us? A study of reasons for encounter in general practice.
The patients' reasons for encounter were recorded in 10 278 personal doctor-patient contacts in nine Norwegian municipalities over a two-month period, and were classified according to a simplified version of the WHO "Reason for Encounter Classification". A two-dimensional classification system was used where each reason was classified according to the location and type of problem. Symptoms and complaints made up 64.9% of all encounters. ⋯ Psychological and social reasons were rather infrequent 3.1% and 0.3%. Compared with the frequencies of psychiatric and social diagnoses recorded in general practice, this indicates a discrepancy between the patient's own opinion of problems and the doctor's interpretations. Females had a significantly higher contact rate than males, mainly due to problems related to the genital system, inclusive of the breast.
-
Scand J Prim Health Care · Sep 1985
Problems in intervention and evaluation. A case report of a community-based rehabilitation and activation programme for the elderly and disabled.
A rehabilitation and activation programme for elderly and disabled home nursing patients and home help clients was launched in Posio, Finland, in 1979. The evaluation of the controlled intervention programme took two years. ⋯ The difficulties of this evaluative study were many, one problem being the low quality of outcome measures. To carry out interdisciplinary evaluative studies, the following recommendations are proposed, based on the experiences of this study: the staff in charge should have previous experience of research; an outside researcher is recommended; the connected study should not be overemphasized, in order to avoid extra pressures on the workers; the time needed to develop the routines for collecting data and writing reports should be estimated in advance and divided between the collaborators; information should be collected by many methods; possible difficulties should be anticipated; besides a local organizing body, a separate, independent and interdisciplinary supervisory team is important; any intervention should be based on the interest of several instances.