[Characteristics of hospital emergency departments users. Frequent users]

To present an assessment of the different profiles of patients that visit the emergency department, including a description of the illness leading to such visits, as well to describe the profiles of individuals who visit with high frequency.

The study was carried out during 2013. Users were classified as infrequent if they made 1 to 3 visits per year, frequent if they made 4 to 9, and hyper-frequent if they visited at least 10 times.

There were 86,673 visits in 2013. There were more visits in July, August and December. Tuesday, followed by Monday and Sunday, were the days that had the highest frequency of visits. The most frequent diagnosis at discharge was "injuries and poisonings" (24.3%), followed by "poorly defined signs, symptoms and status (17.1%) of the visits corresponded to poorly defined states. The discharge to home rate was 90.6%. Out of the 51,672 people who visited the hospital in 2013, 50.8% were female, and 10.2% were under 15 years. Those patients between The ages of 31 and 50, and those over 65 had the highest frequency rate. People living closer to the hospital had higher frequency rate .There were 237 people (0.5%) who made at least 10 visits, and among those, 81 people for no justifiable reason.

An in-depth analysis of the visits due to "poorly defined signs, symptoms and status" would be interesting. The distance to the hospital seems to be determining factor for frequent visits. There is no relationship between socioeconomic status and the number of visits. The frequency of visits increases with age and associated chronic disease, although the high-frequency users with unjustified visits were younger.