Visit patterns at primary care centres and individual blood pressure level – a cross-sectional study

Figure 1.. Flow diagram of patient inclusion and exclusions.

Figure 2.. Distributions of ratio between number of visits to nurse and physician (top) and mean number of visits to physician (middle) or nurse (bottom) for the 188 included PHCCs.

Figure 3.. OR (odds ratio) that the patient would achieve BP ≤140/90 mmHg: at nurse-based PHCCs (the number of visits to nurse is larger than the number of visits to physician) and with an increased mean number of visits to physician or nurse at the PHCC (the OR represents an increase of one in the mean number of visits to physician and nurse respectively). Three different adjustment models were used: model 1 with adjustment for age and sex only, model 2 = model 1 plus BMI, smoking, country of birth, marital status, education and number of anti-hypertensive drugs, model 3 = model 2 plus number of individual visits with a physician or nurse and whether BP was measured by a physician or nurse.

Figure 4.. OR (odds ratio) that a patient would achieve BP ≤ 140/90 mmHg calculated using different ratios between nurse and physician visits at the 188 PHCCs. The OR represents the patients visiting PHCCs with a nurse/physician ratio higher than the number on the y-axes. A value of 1 on the y-axes is the same analysis as in nurse based care in Figure 3 above. The full adjustment model (model 3) was used.