Primary care consults are more complex than you might think

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

A videotape study reveals that primary care physicians often deal with many topics during one patient visit.
Visits to primary care physicians are necessarily brief in duration because the doctor may block in only a 15 minute - or even shorter - session for an individual patient. So what is the best way to use this limited time? A team at Texas A & M Health Science Center has carried out a videotape study that show how much ground is covered in a typical primary care visit.

They used videotapes of 392 primary care visits involving patients aged 65 or older. They learned that, on average, six different topics were discussed in a visit. This is not surprising, because older people often have multiple chronic illnesses and several psychosocial concerns. However, the patient's needs might be better addressed by addressing fewer topics and devoting more time for each one. One way of doing this, say the researchers, would be for the patient to make a written list of their concerns and show this to the primary care physician at the start of the session. Then doctor and patient can agree the most important topics on the list and focus attention on these during the visit. In the end, however, it may be better to persuade the administrators to allow doctors to spend more time with the patient per visit, as appropriate, so that more of their concerns can be dealt with.

Source
Health Services Research online 26th January 2007