Assessing knowledge, attitude and practices of primary health care physicians towards screening patients for hypertension in Cairo

Hypertension [HTN] is a common serious health problem associated with high morbidity and mortality rates .At the same time,HTN is widely prevalent all over the world including Egypt. For many people, the primary care physician is their first point of contact with the health care system, as well as their main source of preventive and essential care. Assessing knowledge, attitude and practices of primary health care physicians towards screening patients for hypertension in Cairo. A cross-sectional study, conducted in the primary health care centres [PHCC] in Nasr city, which was chosen randomly to represent Cairo city, where all doctors working in these centres were asked to complete a self administered structured and open ended questionnaire contained the relevant variables. About 90% of the studied physicians were convinced with the importance of routine measuring blood pressure for risky patients and 79% stated that role of the PHC physician should be the early detection of HTN. As regards knowledge towards HTN items, only 23.5% knew the prevalence and 18.5% knew the most recent definition and grading. The practices of the doctors towards screening patients for HTN,showed that only 63.9% of the doctors usually perform accurate and enough procedures to diagnose HTN patients and 46.2% routinely screen patients around forty years old while only 43.7% were regularly checking up the accuracy of the used sphygmomanometers. The participating physicians had poor knowledge towards some important items especially the prevalence and new classification of HTN. Their practices were not optimal as regards the accurate diagnosis of HTN and routine checkup and measuring blood pressure for people attending the PHC clinics. Recommendations to manage these defects were suggested

Degree of compliance towards therapeutic tasks among diabetic patients attending a health insurance setting in Cairo

Compliance/adherence of diabetic patients towards different therapeutic aspects [other than drugs] is considered one of the most important elements to control diabetes mellitus [DM]. A cross sectional study was conducted on 283 diabetic patients chosen by systematic random sample among those attending Alf-Maskan Health Insurance Outpatients clinics in East Cairo, [from April- May 2007], to assess their compliance behaviors in relation to management of their disease.Showed that most of the diabetics [61.1%] had a poor total compliance rate for the therapeutic tasks of [DM] as a whole, though the larger proportion of the diabetics [44.9%] had a satisfactory overall knowledge about the important items of DM. As regards the individual therapeutic tasks, there were also poor compliance rates concerning diet regimen, regular exercise, cessation of smoking, weight monitoring and care of eye and foot. Good compliance rate was significantly higher among patients who were males, highly educated, those of high socioeconomic level, those who had better knowledge about the disease and those who had suffered from multiple co-morbidities and suffered from DM at least ten years. Recommendations were suggested to improve patient compliance towards management tasks of the disease through health education program because increasing the information of the patients about the disease and its complications through the shared health care team including the patient himself was valuable

Community perception twoards traditional medicine in Nasr - City [Cairo]

This work aimed to assess the community perception as regards knowledge, attitude and use of traditional remedies in Nasr City, Cairo, where all person attending El-Hay El-Sades, PHC Center, were interviewed during one month [October 2003] with a pre-tested questionnaire. 35.6% of the total studied sample had used traditional remedies, mostly herbs [88.3%] with higher prevalence among females [56.1%], older people [56.9%], educated persons [53.5%] and higher socio-economic ones [80.0%]. A strong belief in herbs as an efficient therapy was reported by 54.3% of persons, especially among educated persons [81.7%] in contrast to cautery and bone setting, where the predominant attitude was that these are harmful as reported by 60% and 58% of the sample, respectively. It was also found that three- quarters of the responders did not consult any conventional health care before using these remedies, and 80% of the remaining quarter did not get good benefit from consultation