Family medicine practice and patient profile in UmurluThe Center of Family Medicine: to what extent i̇t meetsthe needs of family medicine field training

Primary healthcare system, rediscovered for improvement of national health care systems in a lot of countries worldwide, began to gain importance in Turkey approximetely half century ago. In the last two decades, attempts for revolution of healthcare reform incresed in our country. Family medicine specialty programmes evolved in clinical practice and family medicine took its place in medical schools as a discipline both in medical education and residency training programmes. These changes are all for reorganization and increasing the quality of primary health care, and gualification of primary care doctors. The goal of this study is to detect to what extent does the patient profile and family medicine practices at Adnan Menderes University Family Medicine Center cover the educational needs of the students and residents in respect to family practice training, and to evaluate the demoghraphic features, complaints, and diagnosis of the patients referred to the center. We also aimed to emphasize common complaints and diseases we come acroos with in our daily practice, that deserve attention, in order to make a contribution to family medicine residency programme. The demographic features, first complaints, diagnoses, medications, diagnostic tests, controls, referrals and consultations of all applications between November 1, 2002 – December 31, 2004 were reviewed from our data base in Umurlu Family Medicine Center. This is a record-based descriptive study. Statistical analyses were performed by SPSS 11.0 programme. 1961 patients made to Umurlu Family Medicine Center between November 2002-December 2004. The mean application number was 1,3/patient. Sixty two percent the patients were women. Housewives, pre-school children and farmers were the most applied groups to the center. Health insurance of the patients was mostly Social Insurance İnstitution. Of the total 1961 patients, 80.8% applied once and 12.4% applied two times. There were 222 different complaints and 221 diagnosis for 2618 applications. Cough, fever, headache, sore throat and lomber pain were the most declared first complaints respectively. The most frequent diagnoses were no diagnosis with 26.3%, upper respiratory tract infection with 19.1% and hypertension with 9%. Referral rate was 5.2% and referrals were mostly to emergency service and pediatrics clinics. Cardiology, ear-nose-throat and ortopedics were the most consultated clinics and consultation rate was 9.7%. Diagnostic tests were required from 44.5% of the 2618 applications.