Implementation of "the patient assessment of chronic illness care(pacic)" in individuals with chronic illness

Objectives: The chronic illness prevalence is increasing every day due to increase in life expectancy and changes in living conditions throughout the world. Mortality and morbidity rates due to chronic illnesses are also priority health problems for the whole world. Therefore assessing the service and improving the service provided are important steps to reduce chronic illness rate, and disability and deaths caused by chronic illnesses. For this purpose, satisfaction of the chronic patients, who have been cared in compliance with PACIC scale, has been assessed in this study. Materials and Methods: This descriptive study was conducted with face-to-face interviews with individuals aged 18 years and over, who were admitted to Ankara Atatürk Training and Research Hospital Family Medicine and Internal Medicine Polyclinics between February 1st and February 28th, 2017. Socio-demographic information form and PACIC scale were applied to the participants with face-to-face interview method. Analyzes of the data were made in the SPSS 22.0 package program. Complementary data were presented as median and mean percentage. The Chi-square test was used to compare the classified data, the Mann Witney U test and the Kruskal-Wallis Variance analysis were used to compare continuous data. The correlation of continuous variables was assessed by the Spearman correlation test. Results: PACIC scale scores were evaluated according to the sociodemographic characteristics and existing chronic illnesses of 300 patients who participated in the study, and a statistically significant correlation was found between the age, education level, income level, regular check-ups, closeness of the last examination dates of the patients and scale score. Among the chronic illnesses evaluated, only chronic thyroid disease was found to have higher correlation with the following: goal setting (p=0.017), monitoring/coordination (p=0.005) sub-scales and total scale scores (p=0.035). There was no significant correlation between PACIC scores and hypertension, DM, asthma/COPD, chronic heart disease, and other underlying diseases. In addition, there was no correlation between total scale scores and sociodemoghraphic data such as gender, marital status and duration of the chronic illnesses. Conclusion: Satisfaction rates of the chronic illness care of the patients evaluated within the scope of the research were determined as moderate. When the sub-dimensions of the study were examined, the highest score was taken from problem solving and the lowest score was taken from the monitoring / coordination sub-dimension. This suggests that the polyclinics that cared the follow-up patients need to observe and improve their practices in chronic illness care, especially in monitoring / coordination sub-dimension.