The quality of preventive health care delivered to adults: results from a cross-sectional study in Southern Italy

BMC Public Health

Research Article

Paolo Rizza¹  Aida Bianco¹  Maria Pavia¹  Carmelo GA Nobile¹  Benedetto Manuti¹ 

[1] Chair of Hygiene, Medical School, University of Catanzaro "Magna Græcia", Catanzaro, Italy;

关键词: Cancer Screening;    Primary Care Physician;    Influenza Vaccination;    Preventive Care;    Cervical Cancer Screening;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2458-10-350

 received in 2009-09-11, accepted in 2010-06-18,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIt is assumed that providing clinical preventive services to patients can identify or detect early important causes of adult mortality. The aim of this study was to quantify access to preventive services in Southern Italy and to assess whether and how the provision of preventive care was influenced by any specific characteristics of patients.MethodsIn a cross-sectional study adults aged 18 years and over attending primary care physician (PCP) offices located in Southern Italy were interviewed from June through December 2007. Quality indicators of preventive health care developed from RAND's Quality Assessment Tools and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) were used. Multivariate analysis was performed to identify and to assess the role of patients' characteristics on delivery of clinical preventive services.ResultsA total of 1467 subjects participated in the study. Excepting blood pressure preventive check (delivered to 64.4% of eligible subjects) and influenza vaccination (recommended to 90.2% of elderly), the rates of delivery of clinical preventive services were low across all measures, particularly for screening and counseling on health habits. Rates for providing cancer screening tests at recommended times were 21.3% for colonoscopy, 51.5% for mammography and 52.4% for Pap smear. Statistical analysis showed clear disparities in the provision of clinical preventive services associated with age, gender, education level, perceived health status, current health conditions and primary care access measures.ConclusionsThere is overwhelming need to develop and implement effective interventions to improve delivery of routine clinical preventive services.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Manuti et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.