Background: Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors are the main reason for the worldwide epidemic of chronic diseases. Changes in lifestyle, such as physical activity, healthy diet, and non-smoking, require preventive strategies at the national and individual levels. Clinical counseling is one of these strategies which helps patients to be motivated and enhance their self-management. The present study aimed to improve clinical counseling practice at the National Guard Primary Health Care Center, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Objective:To assess the quality of counseling from the patient's perspective in the primary care center of the National Guard (specialized polyclinic center) using a modified counseling quality instrument (CQI). Subjects and methods: In a cross-sectional study and through a convenient sampling technique from the patients visiting the National Guard Primary Health Care Center (specialized polyclinic center), 358 patients completed a self-administered questionnaire regarding their experiences of clinical counseling. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to record the statistically significant differences between the ordinal variable of participants' quality scores and their demographic characteristics.
Results: The mean age of participants was 35± 8 years, ranging between 22 to 69 years. Most of the participating patients were women (63%). Slightly more than half the patients obtained clinical counseling during their appointments, and physicians at the clinic gave 57% of these clinical counseling sessions. The patients were generally satisfied with the counseling. They rated the counseling sessions as good in terms of content, the process of counseling, the way of interaction, and the degree of goal-oriented discussion. In addition to receiving counseling from physicians, older participants and those with postgraduate education were found to significantly positively affect patient perceptions of counseling quality.
Conclusion: This study found that half of the participants did not get clinical counseling during their visits, indicating no standardization in clinical counseling services for all patients. Although patients were generally satisfied with the counseling session provided to them, time constraint was the highest dissatisfaction item among two-thirds of the patients in the present study.
Keywords: counseling; education; lifestyle; primary healthcare; quality of counseling.
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