What do adolescent girls experience when they visit family practitioners?

Abstract

Objective: To describe the experiences of 12- to 17-year-old girls when they visit general or family practitioners and to gain some understanding of how they relate to these caregivers.

Design: Qualitative analysis of the oral narratives of eight adolescent girls.

Setting: After-school community drop-in centre for youth in downtown Toronto.

Participants: Eight adolescent girls between the ages of 12 and 17 years attending the drop-in centre.

Main outcome findings: Five themes emerged: adolescent girls feel more comfortable with female physicians, they feel uncomfortable during physical examinations, they would like doctors to explain medical issues, they would like doctors to be more like friends, and they want to be treated as teenagers by their doctors.

Conclusions: This study was unique in its use of personal interviews with adolescent girls to understand the experiences they have had with family physicians. The themes indicated how family physicians could improve therapeutic relationships between themselves and their female adolescent patients.