Screening primary-care patients forgoing health care for economic reasons

Background: Growing social inequities have made it important for general practitioners to verify if patients can afford treatment and procedures. Incorporating social conditions into clinical decision-making allows general practitioners to address mismatches between patients’ health-care needs and financial resources. Objectives: Identify a screening question to, indirectly, rule out patients’ social risk of forgoing health care for economic reasons, and estimate prevalence of forgoing health care and the influence of physicians’ attitudes toward deprivation. Design: Multicenter cross-sectional survey. Participants: Forty-seven general practitioners working in the French–speaking part of Switzerland enrolled a random sample of patients attending their private practices. Main Measures: Patients who had forgone health care were defined as those reporting a household member (including themselves) having forgone treatment for economic reasons during the previous 12 months, through a self-ad...