The association between general practitioners’ attitudes towards breast cancer screening and women’s screening participation

BMC Cancer

Research Article

Berit Andersen¹  Line Flytkjær Jensen²  Thomas Ostersen Mukai²  Peter Vedsted³ 

[1] Department for Public Health Programs, Randers Regional Hospital, Central Denmark Region, Skovlyvej 1, 8930, Randers, NØ, Denmark;The Research Unit for General Practice, Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 2, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark;Section for General Medical Practice, Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 2, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark;The Research Centre for Cancer Diagnosis in Primary Care (CaP), Bartholins Allé 2, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark;The Research Unit for General Practice, Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 2, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark;The Research Centre for Cancer Diagnosis in Primary Care (CaP), Bartholins Allé 2, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark;

关键词: Breast cancer screening;    Participation;    General practice;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2407-12-254

 received in 2011-12-21, accepted in 2012-06-18,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundBreast cancer screening in Denmark is organised by the health services in the five regions. Although general practitioners (GPs) are not directly involved in the screening process, they are often the first point of contact to the health care system and thus play an important advisory role. No previous studies, in a health care setting like the Danish system, have investigated the association between GPs’ attitudes towards breast cancer screening and women’s participation in the screening programme.MethodsData on women’s screening participation was obtained from the regional screening authorities. Data on GPs’ attitudes towards breast cancer screening was taken from a previous survey among GPs in the Central Denmark Region. This study included women aged 50-69 years who were registered with a singlehanded GP who had participated in the survey.ResultsThe survey involved 67 singlehanded GPs with a total of 13,288 women on their lists. Five GPs (7%) had a negative attitude towards breast cancer screening. Among registered women, 81% participated in the first screening round. Multivariate analyses revealed that women registered with a GP with a negative attitude towards breast cancer screening were 17% (95% CI: 2-34%) more likely to be non-participants compared with women registered with a GP with a positive attitude towards breast cancer screening.ConclusionThe GPs' attitudes may influence the participation rate even in a system where GPs are not directly involved in the screening process. However, further studies are needed to investigate this association.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Jansen et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. 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.