Reasons for encounter in video contacts at a Danish out-of-hours primary care service: a questionnaire study

Abstract

Objective To investigate reasons for encounter in telephone triage contacts to an out-of-hours primary care service for which general practitioners (GPs) use video consultations (video contact), overall and stratified for patient age and time of day. Design A cross-sectional questionnaire study among GPs doing telephone triage in an out-of-hours primary care service. The questionnaire was integrated into the electronic patient registration system, popping up after every third video contact. This setup automatically linked patient register data, including age and sex, with the questionnaire data. Setting The study was conducted from 5 September 2022 to 21 December 2022 at the out-of-hours primary care service in the Central Denmark Region. Participants 649 volunteer GPs who answered 2452 questionnaires. Main outcome measures Reasons for encounter in video contacts registered with codes from International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC) coding system, V.2 (ICPC-2). Results GPs doing telephone triage in out-of-hours primary care used video contacts for a broad range of ICPC-2 codes within few ICPC-2 chapters. 83% of all reasons for encounter were due to symptoms in chapters S 'Skin' (34.5%), R 'Respiratory' (21.8%), A 'General and unspecified' (14.7%) and L 'Musculoskeletal' (12.0%) in the ICPC-2 classification system. Video contacts concerning skin and musculoskeletal symptoms were more frequent among older children and adults compared with young children. Respiratory symptoms and general and unspecified symptoms dominated by fever were more frequent among video contacts for young children compared with older children and adults. Conclusion Our study suggests a focused use of video contacts in an out-of-hours primary care setting; the majority of registered ICPC-2 codes were within few ICPC-2 chapters.