The past decade has seen a trend of increasing primary care consultations done at the emergency room. Unfortunately, this trend can compete for essential hospital resources to care for real urgent cases. This cross sectional study aimed to determine the healthcare seeking practices of patients with non-urgent complaint at the Zamboanga City Medical Center Emergency Room. It also tried to determine the proportion of these patients to the total ER consultations, and explore their perception of their illness, and primary reason for this ER consultation. The sample size of the study was 368 respondents and was gathered through a systematic random sampling technique. Interviewer-guided survey questionnaire was used to gather the data for this study, and this data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. A total of 372 respondents were included in the study. Most of the patients belonged to the minor age group (49%), single (70%), with low income status (69%) but with PhilHealth coverage (75%), residing in barangays around ZCMC (50%), and with no known concurrent illness (90%). Majority of the complaints and diagnoses upon discharge were gastro-intestinal related (35% and 24%). It was identified that these patients had low primary healthcare service utilization, seeking delayed and complaint-based consultations, and with high self-medication practices. The proportion of patients with non-urgent complaints consulting at the emergency room was 23%. Almost half of the patients considered their complaint as mild, while the other half considered it moderate to severe. The primary reasons for ER consultation can be summarized as follows: limited access for consultation and services in other healthcare facility, the convenience perceived by the patients when consulting in the emergency room, and the lack of awareness regarding the services offered by other primary health facilities. This paper recommends improving other existing health facilities through enhancement and promotion of their services to direct these patients to the primary healthcare services as first choice for non-urgent complaint instead of the emergency room. Also, a study on hospital resource utilization and financial burden of unnecessary ER consults can be done.

Keyword: Health seeking practices pf patients with non-urgent complaint