RAPID RESPONSES FROM BMJ.COM

doi:10.1136/bmjusa.02020005

BMJ, doi: 10.1136/bmjusa.02020005, (Published 28 August 2002)

Letters

RAPID RESPONSES FROM BMJ.COM

Non-attendance at surgery

Was it the information or the reminder?

Non-attendance at surgery

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This article originally appeared in BMJ USA

EDITOR $---$ The article by Hardy et al and the recent editorial by Sharp and Hamilton¹ draw attention to the perennial problemof non-attendance at outpatient clinics. However, the impact ofnon-attendance for surgery, on health services, remains largelyuninvestigated, despite the fact that cancellations on the dayof surgery are an important parameter in the compilation of hospitalleague tables. Non-attendance for surgery on a case-by-case estimateis more expensive compared with outpatient non-attendance, atabout £100 ($144.62) for minor cases and £800 ($1 156.94) formajors for surgery non-attenders.

We evaluated 100 consecutive women who failed to attend for surgery in our unit, and found that the reasons for non-attendanceat surgery were similar to the reasons for failing to attend outpatientappointments $---$ namely, forgetting the appointment, a long intervalbetween attending the preadmission clinic and the proposed operationdate, intercurrent illness, and . . . [Full text of this article]