PREVALENCE AND FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH ROUTINE MEDICAL CHECKUP AMONG PATIENTS ATTENDING MASAKA REGIONAL REFERRAL HOSPITAL, UGANDA

Globally, Routine Medical checkup is known to be a preventive medicine that opens doors for assessment of well-being status of all individual and decreases the mortality and morbidity of different ailments in communities. attending health checkups may be one of the key reasons of controlling the predisposition and cause of much of the illness, suffering and early death related to chronic illnesses and condition. Its on this ground that this current study sought to elucidate further on factors determining the adherence of people to medical checkups. A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out among 385 adult respondents attending Masaka regional referral hospital, in Uganda. A structured questionnaire involving open-ended and close-ended questionnaire was used and data was analyzed using SPSS version 26. Overall, 61.3% of study participants have ever heard of routine health check-ups citing hospitals (25.7%) as the most used source of the information. A prevalence of 43.4% represents the percentage of those who do routine health check-up and of which majority engage in only a general examination (14.5%). Overall, more than half of the respondents (56.6%) have never participated in routine health check-ups with their reported reasons of not feeling sick (25.97%). Factors like level of education, Employment, Occupational, exercise practices and level of awareness was statistically significant to uptake of routine heath checkup among the respondent at P< (0.005). Low health check-up rates may translate into inability to detect and intervene with early health challenges among respondents, and this is whereeffort is needed in ensuring that routine health check-up is encouraged especially during times when patients are healthy. There is need to strengthen government efforts and other concerned NGOs to put across specific sensitization programs about routine health check-ups on different media platforms and also utilize other social public means.