Objective: To determine the proportion of 50-75-year-old patients of primary care physicians (PCP) who were tested for colorectal cancer (CRC) by either colonoscopy within 10 years or fecal occult blood testing (FOBT) within 2 years. To describe the variation in care between PCPs and factors associated with these proportions. Methods: Cross-sectional study between April and December 2017. Participants: PCPs reporting for the Swiss Sentinel Surveillance Network. Each PCP collected demographic data and CRC testing status from 40 consecutive patients. Measurements: proportions of patients up-to-date with CRC screening and method used (colonoscopy/FOBT/Other); variation in the outcome measures between PCPs; association of physician-level factors with main outcomes. Results: 91/129 PCPs collected data from 3,451 patients; 45% had been tested for CRC within recommended intervals (41% colonoscopy, 4% FOBT). The proportions of patients tested and testing with colonoscopy vs. FOBT varied widely between PCPs. Language region was associated with PCPs' rate of FOBT prescription. Conclusion: Less than half of patients who visited PCPs in Switzerland were up-to-date with CRC screening recommendations. PCPs varied widely in their testing practices.

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Background: The proportion of female physicians working in primary care medicine has increased for several decades. Several studies have reported physician gender differences in preventive health care received by patients, especially for gender-specific preventive services. However, limited data exist on the role of patient and physician gender and gender concordance in the broad spectrum of preventive care. Therefore, we assessed the association between physician gender, patient-physician gender concordance, and the quality of preventive care in Swiss university primary care settings. Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study of 1001 randomly selected patients aged 50-80 years from four Swiss university primary care settings. We used indicators derived from RAND's Quality Assessment Tools indicators and calculated percentages of recommended preventive care (such as behavioral counseling and cancer screening) according to physician and patient gender. We used a hierarchical multivariate logistic regression, adjusting for patients' age and occupation, and for physicians' age, function and centre (both as random factors). Results: 1001 patients (mean age 63.5 years, 557 male) were followed by 189 physicians (mean age 34.2 years, 90 male, 94.7% residents). After multivariate adjustment, female patients received less recommended preventive care than male patients (88.4% vs. 91.3%, p<0.001). Female physicians provided significantly more preventive care than male physicians (p=0.04) to both female (88.8% vs. 87.7%) and male patients (91.6% vs. 90.7%). We found no evidence that preventive care differed among gender concordant and discordant patient-physician pairs (p for interaction = 0.78). Female physicians provided particularly more recommended cancer screening (colon cancer, breast cancer) than male physicians (81.2% vs. 75.3%, p=0.01). Conclusion: In Swiss primary care settings, female patients receive less preventive care than male patients. Furthermore, female physicians provide significantly more preventive care than their male colleagues, particularly for cancer screening. This study suggests that greater attention should be paid to female patients in preventive health care. Further studies are needed to understand why female physicians tend to provide better preventive care.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the association between socio-demographic factors and the quality of preventive care and chronic care of cardiovascular (CV) risk factors in a country with universal health care coverage. METHODS: Our retrospective cohort assessed a random sample of 966 patients aged 50-80years followed over 2years (2005)(2006)