Health promotion priorities for general practice: constructing and using "indicative prevalences"

To construct indicative prevalences for a range of diseases and risk markers and use them in planning health promotion interventions in primary health care.

Indicative prevalences comprised point prevalence, incidence, and mortality measures. Use of data from Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Northern Regional Health Authority, and Newcastle health and lifestyle survey 1991, and research papers to determine prevalence adjusted for age and sex in a hypothetical practice with a list of 10,000 patients.

Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

Indicative prevalences were highest for common risk markers such as failure to achieve exercise targets (6871), moderate to extreme obesity (2785), and smoking (2689); moderate for overt disease such as angina (175) and stroke (20/year); and low for events such as suicide (1/year) and deaths from malignant melanoma (2/10 years).

Given limited time and resources, brief interventions to reduce smoking and the systematic case finding and management of patients with hypertension, angina, and previous myocardial infarction are likely to be the highest priorities for health promotion in primary care.