WORLD JOURNAL OF ADVANCE
HEALTHCARE RESEARCH

*Dr. Fatimatulzahraa Mansoor H. Al zenl and Dr. Sahar A Esa Al-Shatari

ABSTRACT

Background: Screening aims to identify people in the healthy population who are at higher risk of a health problem or a condition so that an early treatment or intervention can be offered, thereby reducing the incidence and mortality of the health problem or condition within the population. Objective: To assess the knowledge of Primary health care doctors about the timing and schedule of screening programs done in Iraq. Methods: A cross-sectional study with analytic elements carried out in 30 primary healthcare centers in Baghdad, Iraq, chosen by simple random sampling during the period from 2nd Jan to 30th June 2022, using a self-structured paper questionnaire was employed to assess the Knowledge of primary healthcare doctors about the timing and schedule of screening programs done in Iraq. The inclusion criteria were all doctors who work at chosen PHCC and are present at the time of the researcher‘s visit and are accepted to be involved in this study. The exclusion criteria were doctors who are not found during the researcher‘s visit day and doctors who will be included in the pilot study. There were 155 physician answered the questionnaire, the collected data were analyzed by using SPSS v.26; frequency, percentage and Chi-square test were calculated. Findings with a P value less than 0.05 were considered significant. Results: There were 155 primary healthcare doctors enrolled in this study, aged between 30-39 (43.1%), most of them are females 78.1%, married 75.5%, and 29.7% were board students with years of experience less than or equal to five years 28.4%, 60.6% of the participating doctors did not take any training courses about screening programs. 83.2% of them had fair overall knowledge, 10.3% of them had good total screening knowledge, and 6.5% had poor knowledge. Conclusion: The study found that the majority of the participants had fair total knowledge about the timing of screening. Better knowledge was accomplished by the age group of 30 - 39 years old and most of them are specialists with years of experience of 6 -10 years, doctors‘ gender and marital status did not illustrate the statistically significant influence on the level of knowledge.

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