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The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey
BACKGROUND: Evidence from first world contexts support the notion that strong primary health care teams contain family physicians (FPs). African leaders are looking for evidence from their own context. The roles and scope of practice of FPs are also contextually defined. The South African family med...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5800021/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29402225 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-018-0710-0 |
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author | von Pressentin, Klaus B. Mash, Robert J. Baldwin-Ragaven, Laurel Botha, Roelf Petrus Gerhardus Govender, Indiran Steinberg, Wilhelm Johannes Esterhuizen, Tonya M. |
author_facet | von Pressentin, Klaus B. Mash, Robert J. Baldwin-Ragaven, Laurel Botha, Roelf Petrus Gerhardus Govender, Indiran Steinberg, Wilhelm Johannes Esterhuizen, Tonya M. |
author_sort | von Pressentin, Klaus B. |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Evidence from first world contexts support the notion that strong primary health care teams contain family physicians (FPs). African leaders are looking for evidence from their own context. The roles and scope of practice of FPs are also contextually defined. The South African family medicine discipline has agreed on six roles. These roles were incorporated into a family physician impact assessment tool, previously validated in the Western Cape Province. METHODS: A cross-sectional study design was used to assess the perceived impact of family physicians across seven South African provinces. All FPs working in the district health system (DHS) of these seven provinces were invited to participate. Sixteen respondents (including the FP) per enrolled FP were asked to complete the validated 360-degree assessment tool. RESULTS: A total number of 52 FPs enrolled for the survey (a response rate of 56.5%) with a total number of 542 respondents. The mean number of respondents per FP was 10.4 (SD = 3.9). The perceived impact made by FPs was high for five of the six roles. Co-workers rated their FP’s impact across all six roles as higher, compared to the other doctors at the same facility. The perceived beneficial impact was experienced equally across the whole study setting, with no significant differences when comparing location (rural vs. metropolitan), facility type or training model (graduation before and ≥ 2011). CONCLUSIONS: The findings support the need to increase the deployment of family physicians in the DHS and to increase the number being trained as per the national position paper. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12875-018-0710-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5800021 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-58000212018-02-13 The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey von Pressentin, Klaus B. Mash, Robert J. Baldwin-Ragaven, Laurel Botha, Roelf Petrus Gerhardus Govender, Indiran Steinberg, Wilhelm Johannes Esterhuizen, Tonya M. BMC Fam Pract Research Article BACKGROUND: Evidence from first world contexts support the notion that strong primary health care teams contain family physicians (FPs). African leaders are looking for evidence from their own context. The roles and scope of practice of FPs are also contextually defined. The South African family medicine discipline has agreed on six roles. These roles were incorporated into a family physician impact assessment tool, previously validated in the Western Cape Province. METHODS: A cross-sectional study design was used to assess the perceived impact of family physicians across seven South African provinces. All FPs working in the district health system (DHS) of these seven provinces were invited to participate. Sixteen respondents (including the FP) per enrolled FP were asked to complete the validated 360-degree assessment tool. RESULTS: A total number of 52 FPs enrolled for the survey (a response rate of 56.5%) with a total number of 542 respondents. The mean number of respondents per FP was 10.4 (SD = 3.9). The perceived impact made by FPs was high for five of the six roles. Co-workers rated their FP’s impact across all six roles as higher, compared to the other doctors at the same facility. The perceived beneficial impact was experienced equally across the whole study setting, with no significant differences when comparing location (rural vs. metropolitan), facility type or training model (graduation before and ≥ 2011). CONCLUSIONS: The findings support the need to increase the deployment of family physicians in the DHS and to increase the number being trained as per the national position paper. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12875-018-0710-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2018-02-05 /pmc/articles/PMC5800021/ /pubmed/29402225 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-018-0710-0 Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Article von Pressentin, Klaus B. Mash, Robert J. Baldwin-Ragaven, Laurel Botha, Roelf Petrus Gerhardus Govender, Indiran Steinberg, Wilhelm Johannes Esterhuizen, Tonya M. The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey |
title | The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey |
title_full | The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey |
title_fullStr | The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey |
title_full_unstemmed | The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey |
title_short | The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey |
title_sort | perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in south africa: a cross-sectional survey |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5800021/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29402225 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-018-0710-0 |
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