Women's preferences for specialists who provide cancer screening and general medical care

In order to determine what types of specialists women prefer for medical care, we examined responses from a cross-sectional survey of adult female patients in a health plan of the independent practice association model in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area (n = 1,204). The response rate for the survey was 90%. The women expressing a preference (60% of responders) overwhelmingly preferred to see obstetrician-gynecologists for their breast examinations and Pap smears and strongly preferred family physicians or internists for the remainder of their cancer screening and general medical care. Thus, the majority of women expressed preferences for physicians of different specialties to provide their medical care.