Patients' assessments of the continuity of primary care in Finland: a 15-year follow-up questionnaire survey.

Background: Continuity of care is an essential aspect of quality in general practice. This study is the first systematic follow-up of Finnish primary care patients' assessments with regard to personal continuity of care.

Aim: To ascertain whether patient-reported longitudinal personal continuity of care is related to patient characteristics and their consultation experiences, and how this had changed over the study period.

Decreasing trends in patient satisfaction, accessibility and continuity of care in Finnish primary health care - a 14-year follow-up questionnaire study.

Background: The aim here was to explore trends in patient satisfaction with primary health care and its accessibility and continuity, and to explore whether through reforms and improvements some of the essential goals had been achieved over a 14-year period of time in Finland.

Methods: Nine questionnaire surveys were conducted over a period of 14 years among patients attending within one week in the 65 health centres in the Tampere University Hospital catchment area. A total of 147,394 responded out of a sample of 333,648 patients.

Trust, self-rated health and mortality: a longitudinal study among ageing people in Southern Finland.

Poor self-rated health (SRH) predicts mortality significantly. High trust has been shown to associate with better SRH in cross-sectional studies and survival in longitudinal studies. However, little is known about the associations between trust, SRH and mortality among ageing people.