French General Practitioners’ Attitudes toward Therapeutic Advances in HIV Care: Results of a National Survey

Abstract

We aimed to assess attitudes to French primary care providers towards recent advances in HIV care. Telephone surveys in a random sample of French general practitioners (GPs) were carried out in April 1996 (response rate=70.3%; n=1186). Only 40.5% of the sample had participated in the regular medical follow-up of HIV-infected patients during the previous year. Among these 480 respondents, only a few (13.3%) declared that they would take care of an asymptomatic patient with a high (>500 cells/mm³) CD4 count as the unique provider. A majority (66.2%) had referred at least one HIV-infected patient to a hospital specialist in the previous year. A total of 31.4% declared that they considered it appropriate for an antiretroviral treatment to be initiated to an asymptomatic patient with 300 CD4 cells/mm³, and only 23.5% were already in favour of combination therapies rather than zidovudine monotherapy as treatment of choice. GPs with the most experience with HIV care tended to be the most reluctant to modify their attitude in favour of earlier initiation of antiretroviral therapies and of the switch from monotherapy to combination therapies.

The survey suggests there is a gap between attitudes of GPs and those of AIDS specialists toward preliminary reports of therapeutic advances in HIV care. Whether or not such a gap may create problems for an appropriate diffusion of new antiretroviral therapies should be carefully monitored, in the context of current reforms emphasizing the key role of primary providers in most health-care systems.