The Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Primary Healthcare Physicians in the Al Qassim Region, Saudi Arabia Regarding Travel Medicine: A Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and objective In the age of globalization, diseases associated with travel have emerged as a focal point of public health interest. This has become particularly relevant in Saudi Arabia after the changes in tourism policy in recent years. Primary care physicians are expected to suspect diseases of importance in certain geographic areas. They should dispense pre- and post-travel advice. This study aimed to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of primary care physicians in the Al Qassim region, Saudi Arabia regarding travel medicine. Methods This cross-sectional study was conducted in the Al Qassim region, Saudi Arabia between October and November 2023. We reached out to all primary care physicians in the region regardless of their gender, nationality, and years of experience. The data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire, which was designed based on the available literature and validated by experts. Results A total of 197 physicians participated in the study; 74% were male, 46% were general practitioners, and 48% had 5-10 years of experience. More than half (51%) of the participants reported a weekly patient load of 50-100, while 47% engaged with 5-10 travelers annually; 53% provided travel health advice and a quarter of primary healthcare physicians never attended travel update sessions or conferences. In the last six months, 48% and 43% of the physicians conducted pre- and post-travel consultations respectively. Approximately 49.2% demonstrated a fair knowledge of the topic. Factors associated with fair knowledge included non-Saudi nationality, age below 30 years, minimal traveler exposure, and infrequent conference attendance (p<0.05). A positive attitude was linked to being under 30 years old, having <5 years of experience, seeing <5 travelers yearly, and possessing a fair knowledge of the topic (p<0.05). Conclusions Overall, about half of the physicians in the Al Qassim region engage with travelers and demonstrate good attitudes and practices toward travel medicine. Opening Saudi borders to tourism necessitates the inclusion of travel medicine in continuing medical education programs to prepare primary care physicians to care for travelers more efficiently.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".