Abstract

RODRIGUEZ MUNOZ, C. et al. Personality trait and psychic discomfort associated with frequent attendance in Primary Health Care. Medifam [online]. 2003, vol.13, n.3, pp.23-30. ISSN 1131-5768.

Background: patients over-users are an important subject for the sanitary system because they take more than 50% of the family practice consultation time, and, furthermore, it's well known that are persons with major risk to suffer psychic disturbance.  Objective: to detect the prevalence of pathologic personality traits in an over-user population; the psychological discomfort and some other associated variables.  Design: observational descriptive transversal.  Setting: Center of Primary Health Care of Granollers-Sud, Barcelona.  Material and method: personal interview to 75 over-users from a middle town in the province of Barcelona. Three questionnaires were administrated: socio-demographic data, The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-II (MCMI-II) and the Goldberg depression and anxiety scale.  Results: middle age of patients was 53 years, with a predominance of female (63,8%). Personality traits more characteristics were compulsive (56,7%), schizoid (46,7%) and dependent (45%). The 88% patients had risk of having a personality disorder and 78,4% had symptoms of anxiety and/or depression.  Conclusions: a passive pattern of confrontation, a difficulty in the emotional process, being reactive to the environment and low self-confidence in their own abilities are personality traits common to over-users. Together with this, the life- events and chronic illness, raises probability to suffer personality disorders.

Keywords : Primary Health Care; Over-user; Personality.

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