Variáveis psicossociais associadas à utilização frequente dos cuidados de saúde primários

  • Carla Maria Brandão Salgado de Oliveira (Student)

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

There are some clients who disproportionately use more health care services than other patients. The so called frequent attenders (FA) are described as clients who seek for health services inappropriately. The high rate in using these services is related to certain sociodemographic, clinical and psychosocial characteristics of these patients. The main purpose of this study is to assess the psychosocial characteristics of a sample of FA of Primary Health Care Services and compare it with a sample of Non-frequent Attenders (NFA). The FA were identified in a total of 12.287 registered clients, having been categorised by gender and age. The sample consists of 40 FA and 100 NFA. The results allowed the identification of 1168 FA and 11.119 NFA. The results showed that the FA have disproportionately more medical consultations in these services than the NFA. The FA represent about 10% of the registered clients aged between 18 and 90 years old and were responsible for 26.5 % (12.281) of medical consultations in 2011. It was found that when comparing FA and NFA, the FA have a worse perception of their current health status, a worse perception of their past health status, more subjective complaints concerning their health and more psychopathological symptoms (anxiety, depression and somatization). These results suggest the demand to identify these clients in order to meet their needs and to perform specific interventions focused on the psychosocial variables found in the FA, so that the number of medical consultations will be reduced.
Date of Award2014
Original languagePortuguese
Awarding Institution
  • Universidade Católica Portuguesa
SupervisorEleonora C. V. Costa (Supervisor) & Ana Margarida Trovisqueira (Co-Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Frequent attenders
  • Primary health care
  • Psychosocial characteristics

Designation

  • Mestrado em Psicologia

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