About Quaternary prevention.

Authors :

Marc Jamoulle¹, Thomas Kuehlein², Giorgio Visentin³, Donatella Sghedoni³, Massimo Tombesi³

Academic centre for general practice, University of Louvain, Belgium
Department of general practice and health services research, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Centre for studies and research in general practice (CSeRMEG), Italy

Aims

Encounter in General Practice/Family Medicine is a meeting point between illness and disease. Looking at patients and doctors beliefs and attitudes, one can define four fields of activity describing the major working areas in GP/FM. Considering clinical prevention as the management of processes over a length of time, one can define four main prevention domains.

This approach enables us to clarify the concepts of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary prevention while defining a new one: Quaternary prevention.

The latter encompasses the consequences of the encounter between the anxiety of the patient and the uncertainty of the doctor and gives insight into the propensity of this kind of meeting to distil sickness, thus creating false positive with its cohort of avoidable human, social and economic costs and suffering

Methods

Launched in 1986 and presented for the fist time in Wonca Hong Kong 1995 the concept of Quaternary prevention has reached the international community of GPs. Though a review of the published papers on the theme, the evolution of the Quaternary prevention will be discussed. The concept is explained and the published papers are quoted on the web

site http://docpatient.net/mj/P4_citations.htm

Results

This concept raises some ethical issues which will be discussed during the workshop.

Slideshows of the workshop are edited here :