The Frequency of Depression Among the General ICPC-2 Coding of Internally Displaced Patients Appeals to Uzhgorod “Interfamily” Clinic in Ukraine

Pavlo Kolesnyk, Daniela Petovka

Keywords: family medicine, internally displaced person, ICPC codes, depressive disorder.

Background:

Thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) from the Southern and Eastern Ukraine had to migrate to Uzhgorod, the capital of Transcarpathian region in western Ukraine which remains the safest place during war with russian aggressors. Many of IDPs have serious health problems and seek for primary medical help at the volunteer clinic «Interfamily» founded due to donations from European and US sponsors. The structure of diseases coded in the system of ICPC-2 is being analyzed by the authors.

Research questions:

How often were depressive disorders diagnosed among the other diagnoses structure of the patients over the age of 18, who appealed to the «Interfamily» clinic from April to November 2022.

Method:

Method of analytical and descriptive statistics was used. Internal database of 3371 IDP patients, coded by ICPC-2 was analyzed. 89 randomly selected patients were anonymously screened for depressive disorder using the PHQ-9 questionnaire (9 questions with 4 variants of answers. Calculation gave an opportunity to evaluate severe/moderate/absence of depression).

Results:

3371 codes were processed within 8 months and 102 of them belong to P (psychological) group, which is 3% of the total amount.
Among 89 registered anonymous responses, severe depression (>20 points) occurred in 6(6.74%)cases, moderate depression (14-19 points) – in 20(22.47%), (10-14 points) – in 22(24.72%), mild depression(5-9 points) – in 32(35.95%), absence of depression (0-4 points) – only in 9 cases(10.11%).

Conclusions:

Frequency depression coding among the general reasons and diagnosis of IDPs was extremely low (3%), which was inconsistent with the results of the anonymous screening for depression (high level of moderate and severe depression).

Points for discussion:

This analysis is the reason for further changes in practice in order to motivate doctors to screen for the most frequent hidden pathologies including depression, as well as for further studies to evaluate the effectiveness of changes in clinic management.