Primary Care Doctors Often Don’t Help Patients Manage Depression: Study

(By Michelle Andrews for Kaiser Health News)

Although primary care doctors frequently see patients with depression, they typically do less to help those patients manage it than they do for patients with other chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma or congestive heart failure, a recent study found.

That is important because research has found that it can be good for patients’ health when physician practices have procedures in place to identify and provide targeted services to patients with chronic conditions and to encourage patients to get involved in actively managing their own care.

But physicians were less likely to use those “care-management processes” with patients who have depression than with those who had other chronic conditions, according to the study in the March edition of the journal Health Affairs. Read article here

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