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Use of walk-in clinics by rural and urban patients
1Department of Family Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton. Olga.Szafran@ualberta.ca
Objective:
To compare use of walk-in clinics by rural and urban family practice patients and to describe patients' perceptions of the quality of care in physicians' offices.
Design:
Questionnaire completed by patients in family physicians' offices.
Setting:
Nine community-based family practices located in rural and urban areas of Alberta.
Participants:
Patients who had visited their family physicians' offices during April, May, June, or July 1997. Response rate was 89.6% (403 of 450 questionnaires were completed).
Main Outcome Measures:
Use of walk-in clinics, patients' perceptions of the quality of care in physicians' offices.
Results:
Overall, 27.5% of patients (22.2% of rural, 35.5% of urban patients) attended walk-in clinics in the 6 months before visiting their family physicians' offices: 43.3% went during weekdays when their family physicians' offices were open. Significantly more rural (91.1%) than urban (60.7%) patients felt they could contact their doctors during evenings and weekends (P.004). Significantly more urban (67.2%) than rural (33.3%) patients did not call their own physicians before going to walk-in clinics (P.002). Patients who attended walk-in clinics were more likely (P.01) than patients who did not to rate their family physicians' office hours poor to good (27.9% vs 15.6%).
Conclusions:
Many patients attending the offices of community-based family physicians in both urban and rural areas of Alberta also attend walk-in clinics. Family practice patients attend walk-in clinics primarily because their own physicians' offices are less convenient.