Family physician's roles in health promotion, what patients want

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Family physicians are interested in health promotion for maintaining one's sound health. But there is little information on what patients think about the practice of health promotion by family physicians. Therefore, we found out whether patients think that it is appropriate for family physicians to be concerned about problems relating to four health risk factors, and the patients' perception both of their own health problems and of the concern actually shown by their family physicians. METHODS: Patients who had visited our two family medicine offices from March to August 1998 was asked to complete a self administered questionnaire. Questions on attitudes to wards and perceptions of family physicians' interest in weight, smoking, drinking, and fitness problems were included. 586 questionnaires with adequate response were analyzed using chi square test and Mantel Haenszel's linear trend test. RESULTS: A total of 586 respondents consisted of 230 men and 356 women. Of the respondents, the proportion of people who thought that family physicians should be concerned about the health risk factors ranged from 83.6% in the case of smoking to 86.5% of fitness, but 76.6% thought their family physicians had in fact been interested in smoking and 72.2% thought so about fitness. There was a significant age group trend in the case of attitudes towards family physician concern for smoking with larger proportions of older patients (p<0.01). Significantly more women than men thought that their family physicians seemed interested in health risk factor with 62.2% to 70.0% in men and 78.6% to 80.9% in women (p<0.001). There were significant age group differences in proportions who thought that their family physicians seemed interested in weight (p<0.001), smoking (p<0.001), and drinking (p<0.05) problems except for fitness problem. 31.6% of the respondents thought that they had a weight problem, 20.5% smoking problem, 14.0% drinking problem, and 28.2% fitness problem. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that many patients thought that most of their family physicians seemed interested in health promotion, but felt the need that they should be come more interested.