Service Development: Assessing Non-attendance Rates in Outpatient Clinics

Imperial College London1 site in 1 country504 target enrollmentOctober 2005

Overview

Brief Summary

Many studies have shown a high non-attendance rate in hospital outpatient clinics. The investigators have found a non-attendance rate of 25% in their asthma clinics and would like to investigate whether a reminder phone call will improve attendance rates. Patients will be randomised into two groups; one group will receive a reminder phone call one week prior to their hospital consultation and the other group will be managed in the standard manner (i.e. no reminder of any sort). The phone calls will be carried out on a Friday afternoon by a respiratory nurse specialist and a research officer for two asthma clinics based on a Wednesday morning and a Thursday afternoon.

Detailed Description

Many studies have shown a high non-attendance rate in hospital outpatient clinics. The investigators have found a non-attendance rate of 25% in their asthma clinics and would like to investigate whether a reminder phone call will improve attendance rates. Patients will be randomised into two groups; one group will receive a reminder phone call one week prior to their hospital consultation and the other group will be managed in the standard manner (i.e. no reminder of any sort). The phone calls will be carried out on a Friday afternoon by a respiratory nurse specialist and a research officer for two asthma clinics based on a Wednesday morning and a Thursday afternoon. To have an 80% chance of detecting a 10% reduction in non-attendance rates (at 5%) 500 patients are required for this study. The rate of non-attendance will be monitored for all the patients in both groups and some demographic information will be recorded for each patient(age, sex, diagnosis and home postcode).

Registry

clinicaltrials.gov

Start Date

October 2005

End Date

November 2006

Last Updated

6 years ago

Study Type

Interventional

Study Design

Parallel