[Characteristics of patients who do not use primary care services]

To determine the proportion of patients who do not consult their doctor for one year time and to investigate their characteristics, to determine of they are different from patients that do consult.

This is a prospective study, with a follow-up of one year in the city of Valencia, Spain. The patients included were all registered in a general practitioner's list, 1473 subjects. We took every day all the patients that consulted: home visits were excluded, and so were visits from patients that did not belong to our territory, patients of another general practitioner's list and all patients under 14 years. We included patients attended without citation. We counted the number of visits for each subject, and their age and gender, presence of hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, chronic respiratory disease, HIV/Aids and health problems that limit their autonomy.

46.3% of patients did not consult, 48.7% made between 1 and 14 visits, and 4.9% 15 visits or more (high utilization is defined as the average plus 2 standard deviations). Among the subjects that did not consult, there were significantly less women, they were younger and had less chronic problems than the patients that consulted and these ones less than high users.

The percent of subjects that did not use primary care medical consultations is 46.3% in one year; they were more frequently men, young people and persons without chronic health problems.