PERCEPTIONS, ATTITUDE AND PRACTICES TOWARD ELDERLY DEPRESSION AMONG PRIMARY HEALTH CARE PHYSICIANS, RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA 2021

Background: Elderly people need care services in particular to maintain a high quality of life and health status. Managing the health needs of geriatric patients is part of the continuity of care family physicians provide to their patients. Aims: to assess physicians attitude, perception and practice toward depression in elderly in primary care sitting. Methodology: A cross- sectional study to assess primary health care physicians attitude and perceptions and practices toward depression in elderly patients in primary health care centers of King Saud medical city in Riyadh, kingdom of Saudi Arabia using self-administrated questionnaire Results: We received 210 responses to our questionnaire with response rate of 100 % where 51 % of them were females. Furthermore, 37 % of them have experience in PHC less than 5 years while 32 % have experience for more than 10 years. PHC physicians routinely screen for sleep disturbance (79 %), loss of interest or pleasure (79 %), sad mood (72 %), and decreased energy (63 %) in order to diagnosis of depression. Moreover, we found that 56 % of physicians would use clinical guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of geriatric depression where PHQ-9 was the most reported used tool (28 %) followed by geriatric depression scales (24%). Moreover, 71 % of physicians would refer patients with depression to psychiatry and 65 % to CBT instead to prescribe medications including SNRI (29 %), TCA (17 %) and SSRI (2 %). Moreover, the main barriers to adequate diagnosis and treatment of elderly depressed patients were rejection of patients to treatment (22 % of them indicated it as major problem) and difficulty for access to mental health care in our community (19 % of them indicated it as major problem). Conclusion: we found that most of physicians in Riyadh show high positive attitude toward depression of elderly however, there is some limitations in knowledge about symptoms of depression and restriction to guideline. Main barriers to adequate diagnosis and treatment of elderly depressed patients were rejection of patients to treatment and difficulty for access to mental health care in our community.