Opportunistic preventive care in general practice

Objective. To assess the degree to which French GPs opportunistically perform primary preventive care during routine consultation. Methods. Observational cross-sectional study, conducted from 28/11/2011 to 30/04/2012. All patients seen by GPs at surgery and home consultations in nonrandomized pre-determined half-day blocks per week were included. Using passive observers, data were collected based on the second version of International Classification of Primary Care. Preventive consultations were defined if at least one problem/diagnosis was considered by consensus as definitely related to primary prevention. For each one of the 128 participating GPs, aggregation of data was performed from all his/her consultations. Determinants of the proportion of preventive consultations per GP were assessed by multivariate linear regression. Results. Considering 19 003 consultations, the median proportion of preventive consultations per GP was 14.9% (range: 0-78.3%). It decreased with increased proportion of patients aged 18 or less (p = 0.006), with increased proportion of home visits (p = 0.008) and with increased proportion of consultations lasting under 10 minutes (p = 0.02). None of the GPs' characteristics were significantly associated. Conclusion. Primary preventive care activity was related to the characteristics of GPs' patients and practice organizational markers, and not to GPs' personal characteristics.