[Issues in conducting health education of patients by primary care physicians]

Patients' health education involves forming their knowledge, attitudes and skills as well as exercising impact on their behaviour in order to maintain or improve one's health. Here, a special role is to be played by primary care physicians.

to estimate conditioning factors and frequency of undertaking health education of patients by primary care physicians.

A survey study was executed with 800 family physicians, with 520 respondents actually returning the questionnaire (response rate--65%). The instrument contained questions concerning socio-demographic and professional situation of physicians, their health state, health behaviours and undertaking health education to patients in their own professional practice. The assessment of the strength of relationships between characteristic features and attitudes of physicians and their undertaking health education to patients was conducted with multinomial logistic regression.

Almost 60% of the respondents declare undertaking health education of patients. Facilitating factors here are family medicine specialization (OR=1.68 [1.11-2.53]), workload of under 50 hours a week (OR=1.67 [1.14-2.43]), living in a town under 100,000 inhabitants (OR=1.56 [1.08-2.27]), staying married (OR=1.55 [1.03-2.33]) and being on a diet (OR=3.22 [1.78-5.85]). Those physicians who work in their profession less than 10 years undertake health education significantly less frequently than their colleagues with a longer work experience (OR=0.57 [0.36-0.90]).

Many physicians (40.1%), especially young inhabitants of cities, do not undertake health education of patients at all. A considerable obstacle in undertaking educational activities seems to be physicians' excessive workload. Those physicians who declare undertaking health education of patients use the knowledge acquired during specialization training (family medicine) or work experience connected with the length of work in the profession. Thus, in order to intensify and optimise primary care physicians' activities with respect to health education of patients it is essential to include this topic in the curricula ofpre- and post-diploma courses as well as family medicine specialty training.