This study examined the characteristics of patients visiting primary care providers in response to a variety of health concerns. It specifically investigated the extent of women’s and men’s health care-seeking behaviours in response to mental and physical health concerns.

Several of the findings confirm what is already known in the literature, such as patients being more inclined to visit their primary care providers in response to physical health concerns than mental health concerns [6]. In addition, we found that women reported that they would visit a family physician in response to both physical and mental health concerns to a greater extent than did men, which is also consistent with other studies [7–12]. Additional examination of facilitators and barriers influencing women’s and men’s health care-seeking behaviours could inform health care initiatives addressing patients’ access to and utilization of primary care.

As expected, we found that age, knowledge of illness prevention, trust in physicians and having chronic conditions significantly predicted health care-seeking behaviour in response to mental health concerns, and this was the case for women and for men. These findings are consistent with previous research [10, 11, 14, 19–22]. However, a new and somewhat surprising finding was that younger patients (women and men) were more willing to seek primary care in response to mental health concerns compared to older patients. This is an encouraging development and we speculate that a number of reasons may be responsible for this shift in health care-seeking behavior. Currently a lot of public health messages, often spearheaded by celebrity Canadians, convey the message that many Canadians suffer from a mental illness and that one should seek help and not be ashamed. In addition, people speak more freely about their struggles with mental health, either in the popular media or via social media and therefore, we speculate, that the stigma around health care seeking behavior for mental health is dismissing.

Most of our variables did not predict health care-seeking behaviour in response to physical health concerns. The sole exception was the finding that women with greater trust in physicians were more inclined to seek health care in response to physical health concerns. Of particular interest is the fact that, contrary to previous research [7, 10, 11, 28], older age did not predict health care-seeking behaviour in response to physical health concerns. Moreover, none of our variables predicted men’s health-care seeking behaviour in response to physical health concerns. It may be that most people would seek health care in response to the particular set of physical health concerns presented in the survey. Finally, knowledge of health maintenance did not predict health care-seeking behaviour for physical or mental health concerns, despite previous research suggesting that increased self-efficacy, in particular for patients with chronic conditions, is associated with improved health outcomes [17].

Although many of our findings were significant due to the large sample, in general the effect sizes were small. Consequently, some of the results may not have meaningful real world implications. Caution must be taken in drawing conclusions until future studies either support or refute them. Nevertheless, we do think that there are clinically significant issues that can be gleaned from the data. First, men are underrepresented in the group of patients seeking primary care in response to both physical and mental health concerns. This has been extensively reported in other literature [7–12], and still remains a concern. Second, it may be suggested that primary care providers should focus on increasing health literacy regarding illness prevention among their patients, so that patients then will be able to better assess when they should seek primary care.

Limitations and future directions

In the survey, patients were asked to indicate whether they would visit a family doctor for a selection of health concerns. The list of health concerns presented was not exhaustive, but instead covered a range of potential health concerns. We subdivided these concerns into two subscales measuring the extent to which they would seek primary care for physical health concerns and for mental health concerns. As these scales were created from the available survey items, they were not externally published or validated, and studies examining other health concerns may find different results and therefore may be limited in its application. Patients were recruited in family physicians’ offices, therefore orphaned patients’ views are not represented in this sample; hence, our sample is not fully representative of the general Canadian population. In addition, we did not ask patients about their sexual orientation. Research suggests that members of the LGBT community often feel less satisfied with primary care than members of non-LGBT communities [12]. Further, we lacked adequate data regarding participants’ cultural background, education and income, which may also be notable determinants of health care-seeking behaviour [10, 11, 20, 22]. The strength of the study was that the sample was large, representing all 10 Canadian provinces. Thus the trend that younger people are more comfortable seeking care from primary care providers for mental health issues is a robust one.