Screening primary-care patients forgoing health care for economic reasons.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Growing social inequities have made it important for general practitioners to verify if patients can afford treatment and procedures. Incorporating social conditions into clinical decision-making allows general practitioners to address mismatches between patients' health-care needs and financial resources.

Objectives

Identify a screening question to, indirectly, rule out patients' social risk of forgoing health care for economic reasons, and estimate prevalence of forgoing health care and the influence of physicians' attitudes toward deprivation.

Design

Multicenter cross-sectional survey.

Participants

Forty-seven general practitioners working in the French-speaking part of Switzerland enrolled a random sample of patients attending their private pract

SUBMITTER: Bodenmann P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3974836 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature