Characteristics of those individuals requesting to be seen by a physician without first having made an appointment ahead of time

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Waiting time to see a physician is considered to be an indicator of user satisfaction. Non-emergency visits made without an appointment ahead of time result in longer waiting times for the patients who have appointments, resulting in the consequent insatisfaction thereof. The purpose of this study is aimed at conducting a quantitative assessment of this type of visits and at ascertaining the characteristics thereof for the purpose of putting measures into practice for the correction and rationalization thereof. METHODS: Descriptive study. A record was made which would gather the characteristics of those patients seeing physicians without having made an appointment, such as age, gender and the characteristics related to the visit (reason, modality, working hours and whether made directly or indirectly). RESULTS: No appointment had been made ahead of time for 14.19% of all non-emergency patient-requested visits. Based on the factorial analysis of multiple correlations, two visit profiles are identified, that is, the direct visits requested by young patients due to illness or red tape at the end of the physician’s morning hours, said young patients being present, and the indirect visits during the visits for which appointments have been made ahead of time by patients requesting prescriptions. CONCLUSIONS: There are a large number of visits for which no appointment has been made ahead of time. Measures must be taken for the purpose of channeling the use of the appointment organization system and of improving those situations involving a lack of accessibility for the end purpose of improving the degree of satisfaction of those using the public health care services.