Introduction: A call to an emergency number is often the first course of action among care-seekers seeking emergency care. The emergency medical communication centre assesses the call and dispatches resources to meet the care-seekers' care needs. Knowledge concerning specific healthcare pathways is sparse and does not include the care-seeker perspective. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore care-seekers' experiences of healthcare pathways following a call to the national emergency number.
Methods: The study was an explorative cross-sectional study using data from telephone interviews with callers to the Swedish national emergency number. Study informants (n = 141) provided descriptions of incidents (n = 156) that led up to the call, as well as their experiences following a healthcare pathway. Data analysis included mapping healthcare pathways, descriptive statistics, and gathering descriptions of care-seeker experiences.
Results and conclusions: This study shows the multiple healthcare pathways for care-seekers following a call to the national emergency number. The accessibility and availability of the healthcare system are found to be difficult to grasp among care-seekers. Decisions on which pathway to follow are primarily made by healthcare professionals rather than the care-seekers, which supports the notion that the system is not being designed from the care-seekers' perspective. Expressions of increased vulnerability, being unsafe and feeling lost were common among the care-seekers, regardless of which pathway was followed. The findings of this study could be used as an incentive for healthcare providers to develop a healthcare system based on the found novel knowledge of the care-seekers' perspective.
Copyright: © 2025 Wihlborg et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.