Disease prevention in general practice from patient’s perspective depending on presence of chronic disease

Disease prevention is one of the most important General Practitioner’s (GP’s) tasks in Primary care. Currently, it is very important to protect patients from COVID-19, especially those in risk groups. To accomplish qualitative disease prevention, we need doctor’s knowledge and patient’s partnership. To achieve patient’s compliance, we must understand how knowledgeable they are about prophylaxis and we must speak in their language to educate them. After literature review and qualitative research on disease prevention, we have developed questionnaire for patients to find out their view of prophylaxis. In this topic we chose seven closed and one opened question from whole questionnaire. Data analysis was done using SPSS and NVivo12 software. To analyse data respondents were divided in two groups – with chronic diseases (CDG) and without chronic diseases (WCDG). There were included 236 respondents(147 women, 89 men) from different GP’s lists, living in one region (mean age 51,4±15,9 years). There were 92(38,98%) respondents in CDG and 144(61,02%) - WCDG. There is statistically significant difference between replies about their last preventive examination within last year – 52,08% CDG and 81,53% WCDG (p<0,05). In both groups only small part had prophylaxis as the reason for GP’s appointment(48,61% WCDG and 35,87% CDG), but there was no statistically significant difference(p>0,05). Further results highlighted different reasons for GP’s appointment, there were significant differences between both groups. Analysing opened question about reasons for GP’s appointment without complaints majority of respondents named prophylaxis or health check-up. Patient knowledge about prophylaxis help to achieve disease prevention goals. There must be clearly defined period for every patient to see GP even without complaints. If prophylactic programme is carried out in high quality and timely manner and chronic diseases are well controlled, then in situations as COVID-19 pandemic, we can consult patients remotely more often than without qualitative disease prevention.