Early COPD Diagnosis in Family Medicine Practice: How to Implement Spirometry?

Table 1

Baseline information on recruitment family practices and factors influencing participation.

	Hospital clinics  𝑁=1	Community clinics  𝑁=4	Private clinics  𝑁=7
Health professional per clinic
Physicians	15	1–11	1–5
Nurses	2	1-2	0–2
Spirometry done by
Nurse from the clinic	No	Yes	No
Respiratory therapist sent to the clinic	Yes	Yes	Yes
Facilitating factors	Great awareness of the disease and hence already using spirometry	Available nurse to do spirometry	Access to large population of elderly patients
	Direct, frequent contacts with respirologists	Physician has more time per patient	Champion in the team
Limiting factors	Most patients referred with a diagnosis of COPD already	Small volume of patients	Physician has limited visit time per patient (large volume of patients)
	Many different doctors attending the clinic	High immigrant population (language barriers)	Often no personnel available for spirometry
	Nurses available, but overloaded	Younger population