Knowledge and Practices Toward Routine Medical Checkup Among Middle-Aged and Elderly People of Riyadh.

Abstract

Introduction:Routine checkup is a form of preventive medicine, it’s a helpful practice to promote health in the community. Studying the prevalence of routine checkup, awareness, influencing, and preventing factors for it in our community will be a helpful tool for the health authorities to promote among individuals.Methodology:This cross-sectional study was conducted in different locations of Riyadh using a convenience sampling technique, with sample size of 414 Saudi participants of both genders aged 36 years old and above. The data were collected through self-administered structured questionnaire with demographic variables, frequency of routine medical checkup, knowledge questions, factors that enhance or prevent individual to do routine checkup and best way to spread the awareness.Results:Two hundred eighty-eight (69.57%) participants knew well about routine checkup and 142 (34.3%) of them do routine medical checkup. “Lack of time” and “Laziness” were reported as the 2 most common preventing factors (46% and 45.2%), respectively, and most common reason that influenced their practice was “health concern” (77.5%) followed by “worry about chronic or serious illness” (32.4%). Participants believed that social networks (eg, twitter, Facebook, etc) and media (eg, TV, radio) are most effective ways to spread awareness of it in the community (53.86% and 52.89%, respectively).Conclusion:There was high level of knowledge on routine health checkup, but a low prevalence was observed in practice. Hence, more health initiatives should be taken for routine medical screening in the Saudi community.