Introduction:

The use of health services is a social, dynamic and complex process.

Objective:

Describe the use of health services by the population of four family doctor and nurse's offices.

Methods:

Descriptive cross-sectional study carried out from January 2019 to January 2020. A survey was applied to 775 people of 18 years and older. The data was processed using the SPSS statistical package version 20.0 for Windows. Descriptive statistics were used, expressing the results in frequency distribution tables.

Results:

The age range of greatest representativeness was 70-74. The female sex represented 10.2% (46) and the male sex was 12.7% (41). In relation to the initiative to request promotion and prevention activities, the most requested were blood pressure testing, medical check-up and body weight. The usual request of prescriptions (706; 87.3%) is made to the doctor in the office. The place where the patient goes, fundamentally, in case of needing non-urgent medical attention is to the family doctor's office (650; 83.9%). The places where the patient goes, essentially, in case of needing urgent medical attention are the emergeny service in the hospital (520; 67.5%) and the emergency service of the polyclinic (208; 27.0%).

Conclusions:

The population of the four family doctor's office studied uses the services at different levels according to the health problem they need to solve. It would be important to be able to identify in other research why the least requested activities are digital rectal examination, prostate antigen and breast physical examination, in order to draw strategies that allow increasing empowerment for individual health.

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