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Investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in Japan: a cross-sectional study
BACKGROUND: Many women face a variety of barriers to seeing obstetricians and gynecologists (OB/GYNs). Primary care physicians (PCPs) in Japan are not well equipped to address and adequately handle women’s health issues. Hence, opportunities for women to consult PCPs about women’s health issues are...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9511763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36163008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-022-01862-0 |
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author | Narumoto, Keiichiro Miyazaki, Kei Inoue, Machiko Kaneko, Makoto Okada, Tadao Sugimura, Motoi |
author_facet | Narumoto, Keiichiro Miyazaki, Kei Inoue, Machiko Kaneko, Makoto Okada, Tadao Sugimura, Motoi |
author_sort | Narumoto, Keiichiro |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Many women face a variety of barriers to seeing obstetricians and gynecologists (OB/GYNs). Primary care physicians (PCPs) in Japan are not well equipped to address and adequately handle women’s health issues. Hence, opportunities for women to consult PCPs about women’s health issues are often limited during busy outpatient encounters. It is essential to explore PCP’s roles in women’s health care by examining women’s health needs in a primary care setting. The aim of the study is to describe the prevalence and distribution of women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions among women visiting a primary care clinic. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study using a questionnaire. We included women aged 20–60 years who visited a primary care clinic for any reason. The questionnaire comprised a list of women’s health issues, the General Help Seeking Questionnaire to assess help-seeking intentions, and participants’ demographics including their reasons for visiting and regularity of OB/GYN visits. RESULTS: We distributed the questionnaire to 294 women and analyzed 260 valid responses. The average age of the respondents was 40.5 years old, and they had an average of 5.2 clinic visits a year. Approximately half of them (50.4%) visited for their own care. One hundred thirty-nine (53.9%) reported at least one women’s health issue, and 73.9% of them had no regular visit to an OB/GYN. The major concerns of women’s health issues included gynecological cancer screenings and menstrual problems. The distribution of help-seeking intentions for each source of care appeared to be classified into three patterns. One fifth of the women indicated high help-seeking intentions for PCPs, and a greater number of women expressed higher help-seeking intentions for PCPs when they did not regularly see an OB/GYN. CONCLUSIONS: A significant number of women who visited a primary care clinic had a specific concern about women’s health issues, and a majority of them had not regularly visited their OB/GYN. PCPs may have an important role in providing an opportunity for women to discuss their concerns about women’s health issues as part of comprehensive care during a daily clinical encounter. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9511763 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-95117632022-09-27 Investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in Japan: a cross-sectional study Narumoto, Keiichiro Miyazaki, Kei Inoue, Machiko Kaneko, Makoto Okada, Tadao Sugimura, Motoi BMC Prim Care Research BACKGROUND: Many women face a variety of barriers to seeing obstetricians and gynecologists (OB/GYNs). Primary care physicians (PCPs) in Japan are not well equipped to address and adequately handle women’s health issues. Hence, opportunities for women to consult PCPs about women’s health issues are often limited during busy outpatient encounters. It is essential to explore PCP’s roles in women’s health care by examining women’s health needs in a primary care setting. The aim of the study is to describe the prevalence and distribution of women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions among women visiting a primary care clinic. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study using a questionnaire. We included women aged 20–60 years who visited a primary care clinic for any reason. The questionnaire comprised a list of women’s health issues, the General Help Seeking Questionnaire to assess help-seeking intentions, and participants’ demographics including their reasons for visiting and regularity of OB/GYN visits. RESULTS: We distributed the questionnaire to 294 women and analyzed 260 valid responses. The average age of the respondents was 40.5 years old, and they had an average of 5.2 clinic visits a year. Approximately half of them (50.4%) visited for their own care. One hundred thirty-nine (53.9%) reported at least one women’s health issue, and 73.9% of them had no regular visit to an OB/GYN. The major concerns of women’s health issues included gynecological cancer screenings and menstrual problems. The distribution of help-seeking intentions for each source of care appeared to be classified into three patterns. One fifth of the women indicated high help-seeking intentions for PCPs, and a greater number of women expressed higher help-seeking intentions for PCPs when they did not regularly see an OB/GYN. CONCLUSIONS: A significant number of women who visited a primary care clinic had a specific concern about women’s health issues, and a majority of them had not regularly visited their OB/GYN. PCPs may have an important role in providing an opportunity for women to discuss their concerns about women’s health issues as part of comprehensive care during a daily clinical encounter. BioMed Central 2022-09-26 /pmc/articles/PMC9511763/ /pubmed/36163008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-022-01862-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Narumoto, Keiichiro Miyazaki, Kei Inoue, Machiko Kaneko, Makoto Okada, Tadao Sugimura, Motoi Investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in Japan: a cross-sectional study |
title | Investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in Japan: a cross-sectional study |
title_full | Investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in Japan: a cross-sectional study |
title_fullStr | Investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in Japan: a cross-sectional study |
title_full_unstemmed | Investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in Japan: a cross-sectional study |
title_short | Investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in Japan: a cross-sectional study |
title_sort | investigating women’s health issues and help-seeking intentions in primary care in japan: a cross-sectional study |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9511763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36163008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-022-01862-0 |
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