Strategies to prioritize prevention in the Greek primary healthcare system

The present study presents financial incentives for General Practitioners(GPs) to engage in specific preventive care services and describes new roles for nurses to provide recommendations regarding brief nutrition counseling. To calculate the total number of personnel required to provide nutrition counseling, we considered 4 elements: (1) published and estimated time required to deliver nutrition counseling (2) the number of the maximum patients seen per day (3) the annual workload of the provider and (4) the number of people requiring those services. We annualize the frequency of performing specific preventive care services by GPs based on the official recommendations by the American Cancer Society. One exclusive nurse could provide a plan of care, designed to help almost 20.000 individuals either maintain the assessed status or attain a healthier status. Screening tests for cervical, colon and breast cancer should be performed by GPs to at least 3.537.810 individuals of the total Greek population for the year 2018.