Family medicine reference clinics were established in 2011 with the aim of strengthening interprofessional treatment of patients, giving graduate nurses more responsibility and tasks in the treatment of chronic patients. The introduction of reference clinics also led to the establishment of quality indicators and chronic patient registers, in which nurses enter the number of chronic patients for each individual disease. Based on the data from these registers, which are recorded in family medicine clinics, we should have an insight into the prevalence of chronic diseases in Slovenia. The analysis provided quality indicators for six different chronic diseases and one quality indicator for all chronic diseases together, in the period from the beginning of recording until the end of 2020.
The purpose of the work is to assess the trend in the prevalence of chronic diseases in Slovenia from data reported by family medicine clinics and to compare these estimates with prevalences estimated on the basis of previous national statistical data obtained from the literature, and to analyze trends in the inclusion of family medicine clinics among reference clinics. We performed a regression analysis using the least squares method, in which we were interested in the explanatory power in the form of the coefficient of determination and then the correlation between the movement of prevalence and time. In the next step, we determined the direction of the correlation, or the direction of the trend between prevalence and time, and then estimated the regression coefficients for each individual disease. We also checked the correlation between individual disease prevalences and the prevalence of all chronic diseases. We used the Excel program to perform these analyses.
The increasing trend was negative for the prevalence of all chronic diseases combined and for the prevalence of coronary disease. For all other diseases, i.e. the prevalence of diabetes, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, arterial hypertension and coronary disease, the increasing trend was positive, which does not explain the negative trend of decreasing prevalence in the register of all chronic patients. In further studies, it would be reasonable to investigate errors in information systems during data collection in order to determine a possible connection with these findings. For all chronic diseases that we analyzed, the linear trend of increasing prevalence over time was statistically significant. The explanatory power and the coefficient of determination were highest for the prevalence of hypertension, and lowest for the prevalence of diabetes. The prevalence of coronary heart disease and the prevalence of all diseases have a negative increasing trend, while all other diseases have a positive increasing trend in prevalence over time. When comparing the prevalences estimated based on quality indicators and those based on literature sources, we found that the prevalences approximately coincide, but are not higher than the prevalences known so far, which implies that family medicine clinics did not yet have all chronic patients recorded by the end of 2020. From the data collected by family medicine clinics by the end of 2020, we cannot yet estimate the real prevalence of chronic diseases in Slovenia.
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