With the development of general medicine in China, the number of visits to community medical institutions has increased, and the phenomenon of intermittent and continuous frequent visits exists, while some of these visits are abnormally frequent, resulting in the irrational use of community medical resources.

To understand the current situation of intermittent and continuous frequent visits among community residents in Beijing, and to analyze the characteristics of people with continuous frequent visits and discover the causes of frequent visits.

Residents who visited the community health service stations in Sanlihe District 2, Beijing from January 2017 to December 2019 were retrospectively selected as the study subjects, and those who visited the top 10% of the community health service stations in a year (from January to December) were considered frequent patients, those who visited the top 10% of the community health service stations in each of the three years were considered continuously frequent visited patients, and those who visited the top 10% of the community health service stations in only one or two years were considered intermittent frequent patients. Patients' visits, basic information and illnesses were analyzed, and "face-to-face" interviews were conducted with five patients each from intermittent and frequent visitors to find out the reasons for their frequent visits.

A total of 639 frequent patients were included in the study, divided into a continuous frequent group (92 patients) and an intermittent frequent group (547 patients) . There were no statistically significant differences between the two groups in terms of gender, age, marital status, education, proportion of overweight/obesity people, and proportion of people who have signed up with a family doctor (P>0.05) . The top 5 chronic diseases in both groups were hypertension, type 2 diabetes, dyslipidaemia, coronary heart disease and stroke; there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups in terms of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, dyslipidaemia, coronary heart disease and stroke and the complexity of the diseases (P>0.05) . Further interviews revealed that the top three reasons for choosing to visit the community included obvious geographical advantages and short waiting time (n=9) , good doctor-patient relationship and basic satisfaction of daily medical needs (n=7) , and higher reimbursement rate than specialist hospitals (n=6) . The top three reasons for intermittent frequent visits included smooth disease control resulting in fewer visits (n=2) after improvement in follow-up behavior (normative medication behavior, change in visiting habits) , a transient increase in the number of visits due to acute episodes or changes in chronic conditions (n=2) , and recurrent visits due to periodic "emotional" distress (n=1) ; The top 3 reasons for continuous frequent visits included taking medicines in multiple visits per month due to mismatch between the number of doses available in a single box and the number of doses in the disease cycle (n=3) , repeated visits due to prefer the original drug and refusal of substitution (n=1) , and repeated community visits due to untimely referrals (n=1) .

The phenomenon of frequent visits exists among community-dwelling people in Beijing, and patients with continuous frequent visits take up a larger amount of health care resources, which is characteristically not much different from patients with intermittent frequent visits, but their occupancies on medical resources are quite different, and the attention should be intensified to patients with abnormal frequent visits in the daily diagnosis and treatment, and convert patients with continuous frequent visits into those with intermittent frequent visits to make efficient use of medical resources.