Descriptive study of patients attending Primary Care settings without previous appointment

Introduction and objectives: 1. To establish the prevalence of patients? visits without appointment ?out of agenda visits (OAV)? in our settings. 2. To establish the rate of not justification of these visits and the circumstances associated to a not justified visit. Material and methods: transverse descriptive study undertaken in two pediatric settings of a Primary Care Centre. Participants: 392 children 0-15 years of age arriving without advanced appointment. They were collected through consecutive sampling between March 7th and September 15th 2003. Main measurements: Prevalence of OAV; percentage of not justifiable OAV; circumstances associated. Statistics: Student-Fisher t test, X2 test, logistic regression with Odds Ratio (OR) estimation and their 95% IC. Results: OAV prevalence: 23% (95% IC: 21%-25%). 52,8% of children were under 5 years. 73% (95% IC: 68,6%-77,4%) of visits were considered as subjective. Subjectivity was associated to females (OR: 1,62; 95% IC: 1,02-2,56) and to children under 5 years (OR: 1,9; 95% IC: 1,2-2,9). Conclusions: our prevalence of AOV is higher than published by others. Circumstances such as the short age of most of the visited children and the excellent geographic and agenda accessibility of our Center may contribute to explain this fact.