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.