The EUROPREV network has been busy since 2006 following up on its ‘Prevention and health promotion in clinical practice: The views of general practitioners in Europe’ paper, published in 2005. It has set itself the ambitious task of turning the tables and documenting the views of the patients that these GPs serve. The ‘EUROPREVIEW Patient Study’ has now individually consulted over 8000 patients in 22 countries across Europe with a view to answering the following research questions: What are patients’ beliefs and attitudes towards preventive services and lifestyles?, and how does this relate to their actual behaviour and the support patients receive from their General Practices/Health Centres? Completion of the extensive and laborious process required to collect so much data has only been possible due to the generosity and hard work of EUROPREV delegates and collaborators across the continent.
With the patient questionnaires having now been administered, the data diligently entered into a central database through individually customised country web-portals, and quality control of data collection complete, the time has come to analyse this interesting data set. The ways in which views and attitudes of differing patient groups both coincide and diverge will be observed, along with the contributions made by various general practice/health centre factors and health service characteristics. This analysis will take place during the first trimester of 2010, leading to a decision at the EUROPREV meeting in March on how best to present results at WONCA conferences and draw up a paper for dissemination of findings. Results will complement those of the previous EUROPREV survey from the GP’s point of view, with both the GP and patient studies subsequently expected to contribute to the formulation of the new European agenda for disease prevention and health promotion in general practice/family medicine.
In a related development, also designed to aid formulation of such a European agenda, EUROPREV has drawn up a ‘Policy statement on prevention and health promotion in primary care’. This document draws on the valuable work of colleagues at the Norwegian Society of GPs in defining national, local and individual levels of preventive health care in its own detailed policy document. EUROPREV has sought to distil the important population strategies in prevention and health promotion detailed therein, along with the recommendations on how to collaborate effectively with local public health authorities, into a shorter document with concrete and precise points, very much focused on the role of GPs.
EUROPREV presented its policy statement during an open meeting at the WONCA Europe meeting in Basle in September 2009 and looks forward to taking part in further debate and deliberation around the issues at hand in order to assist in defining the role of the GPs in prevention and health promotion— areas that it strongly believes should represent essential elements of primary care.