Patients’ Attitude to Taking and Interpretation of Laboratory Tests
Linas Pauliukėnas, Daiva Andriukaitienė
People like to talk about health and interpret results of laboratory tests in their own way. This, not medic, attitude to laboratory diagnostic and its value is very interesting. We looked through last year Lithuanian scientific journals and didn’t find any article about laboratory tests, where questions about preparation of patients to these tests and the importance of interpretation of these tests’ results were anatysed. All mentioned probtems encouraged us to study deeper the importance of laboratory tests for Kaunas PSPC patients.
The aim of this article - to establish the importance of attitude to laboratory tests interviewing patients in primary health care level and to assess patients’ knowledge in preparation for laboratory tests and patients’ reactions to test results.
Material and methods. 130 patients, who agreed to participate and had experiences of laboratory tests in different PSPC in Kaunas, were interviewed. Interview method and questionnaires were used in the research. Data were analysed using statistical methods.
Results. Data of 120 patients were analyzed. It was found that patients know best a common blood test (89.70% (nm=35) men and 95.10% (nw=77) women said that they know this test) and that patients at least know glucose test (76.90% (nv=30) men and 50.60% (nm=41) women said that they don’t know this test). The biggest part of patients was prepared for the laboratory tests correctly, but some of them tend to conceal the factors influencing the validity of the tests. The tests results do not trust only a small proportion of respondents. These patients would like to repeat their laboratory tests in other med i cal institut ions. Summarizing the research results revealed that the maj ority of respondents do not participate in any preventive-diagnostic programs. However, this argument needs to be investigated deeper in other studies.
Conclusions. Assessment of patients’ knowl edge of lab o ra tory tests showed that 70.83% of all patients know how to properly prepare for taking tests, but 29.17% not always behave as required, and as a reason of such behaviour - modesty and inconvenience to ask - pointed out 29.63% of women and 25.64 % of men. The tests results trust 71% (n=37) of those respondents who often take laboratory tests and 59.02% (n=36) of those respondents who rare take laboratory tests, and only 18.33% (n=22) of respondents said, that they do not trust tests results and would like to repeat their laboratory tests in other medical institutions. Names of taken laboratory tests are more familiar for women not for men. This suggests the fact that women are more involved in preventative health checking than men. Nevertheless, we can conclude that people are not very interested in protecting their health.
Keywords: patient, preventive tests, blood test, urine test.
