Η πρωτοβάθμια φροντίδα υγείας και ο ρόλος του οικογενειακού ιατρού
The role of general practitioners in primary health care
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Abstract
Primary Health Care (PHC) is undoubtedly the pillar of the National Health System not only in Greece but also in almost all developed countries in the world. This is the reason why all Health Systems put special emphasis on the perfect implementation and operation of PHC. After a brief description and analysis of the structure and operation of PHC in Greece and some other European countries as well, our investigation focuses on the importance of the general practitioner to ensure the high quality of the PHC services to Greek citizens and patients. A brief overview of the situation in Health Systems of some other countries confirms this finding.
However, believing that the evaluation of the effectiveness and quality of PHC should not be limited to the daily empirical impression of the operation of PHC struc-tures from the medical and nursing staff who staff these structures, we undertook a small scale research, in order to evaluate, with the help via a questionnaire, the quality of the provided services of PHC based on the degree of satisfaction of the users (pa-tients).
In this way, we believe that evaluation is not limited to the subjective perception of medical and nursing staff, but arises as a result of the use of tools and methods that en-sure objectivity, reliability and the data validity.
The analyses of Descriptive and Inferential Statistics that we applied, confirmed our hypotheses. In general terms PHC users are satisfied with the quality of the services provided. That is why we believe that both the theoretical part of the work and the em-pirical one are small (to the extent of the possibilities of such a dissertation) but an important contribution to the study of the subject.