Objective:

To assess the use of non-urgent telephone consultations in family medicine, the user profile, and the factors associated with its use. To check reasons, suitability of phone calls and resolution capacity.

Design:

Descriptive, cross-sectional study.

Location:

Urban Primary Healthcare Area.

Participants:

All phone calls made by persons ≥ 14 years old included in the non-urgent telephone consultation schedule of three doctor’s rosters, during September, October and November 2017.

Main measures:

Proportion of non-urgent phone consultations to total calls, quantification of persons, suitability of phone calls, and resolution capacity. Independent variables: user profile (socio-demographic characteristics, Charlson Index, polypharmacy, and use of healthcare services) and reasons for the call. Multivariate analysis to determine possible factors associated with the use of telephone calls.

Results:

259 out of 6,050 consultations were telephone calls (4.28%; 95% CI: 3.80-4.82) from 184 persons. The average age was 64.6 (SD: 20.1), 69.6% women. 10.3% presented severe Charlson Index, 59.2% used ≥ 5 drugs. There were 294 reasons: prescription renewal (45.9%) and clinical consultations (20.9%, especially musculoskeletal). 80.5% of reasons were resolved. 211 were suitable consultations (81.5%). Through multivariate analysis, making ≥ 2 calls was independently associated with: lower number of patients seen/day of the call (OR: 1.1; p=0.044), higher number of drugs used (OR: 1.25; p=0.006), and higher number of hospital admissions/last year (OR: 2.93; p=0.021).

Conclusions:

In our environment, non-urgent telephone consultations represent a low proportion of the family doctor’s activity. However, they seem to have high suitability and resolution capacity. It would be necessary to quantify their impact on face-to-face consultations.

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