Gonna mostly say it's not the patients that are the problem, but the lack of reliable alternative access to care. If primary care could reliably see the primary care bits – and have enough time in their schedule to deal with it, rather than turf it to the ED – then behaviours might change.
And probably specialist wait times have some impact, as well.
So I'm gonna disagree on some level. I don't think patients are 100% fault, but I place more blame than perhaps you do.
Ultimately it comes down to expectations of delivering health care on the patient's schedule. For the longest time, for hundreds of years, people would have ailments and aches and pains and whatever and they would just deal with them. Whether they would be orthopedic, cough, rashes, headaches, minor infections, and so forth. They would just deal with it for days if not weeks and what would happen is the majority of these would just get better, and a minority of them would get worse, and then they would see a doctor.
Now adays, patients want immediate access to health care for these minor ailments, and we don't have a system set up for that. It requires a lot more resources to be able to see doctors immediately for everything at a moments notice. This in combination that patients are becoming more complicated too as we engineer new novel therapies, immunologics, and so forth for all sorts of inflammatory ailments, cancers, etc. We are keeping people alive longer and they need more health care as a result. This phenomemon would be measured in the number of visits to see doctors (or any health care practiticioner) per year, maybe subanalysis as grouped by decade. The appearance is that we are seeking more medical care, more quickly in this decade as compared to the 1980s, 1950s, etc. Problem is I'm not sure this has been measured, although I'm not super smart and I suspect this on some level has been measured.
On some level if we keep people alive longer and have more advanced therapies, we need to train more doctors that we would need in years 1900s or 1800s, and we haven't done that. But we also need patients to stop wanting immediate health care for a bunch of silly complaints that they just have to deal with, and have dealt with, for decades and centuries.
So we need more doctors. And we also need to have patients have a little more patience with their bodies. If they want immediate access to health care, then I think it's reasonable that they pay for it. (And by the way I think true emergency care should be a social benefit taxed at state or federal level.) Specifically in ER we are getting flooded with all sorts of non emergencies and are responsible for taking care of all the gaps we have in our health care system, and it's overwhelming and is probably #1 or #1a in contributing to ER burnout.
