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Evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor?

BACKGROUND:  Nonattendance is a common problem worldwide. Important factors for nonattendance are a queue or the waiting time until the planned service. AIMS: The aims of this study were to identify the reasons for nonattendance to planned consultations, assess the waiting time from registration to...

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Autores principales: Zykienė, Bernadeta, Kalibatas, Vytenis
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9082880/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35534875
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-022-08033-y
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author Zykienė, Bernadeta
Kalibatas, Vytenis
author_facet Zykienė, Bernadeta
Kalibatas, Vytenis
author_sort Zykienė, Bernadeta
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND:  Nonattendance is a common problem worldwide. Important factors for nonattendance are a queue or the waiting time until the planned service. AIMS: The aims of this study were to identify the reasons for nonattendance to planned consultations, assess the waiting time from registration to access to an outpatient specialist consultation, and identify the associations between the reasons for nonattendance and the waiting time until the planned outpatient specialist consultation. METHODS: A cross-sectional study based on a phone questionnaire was conducted among patients not attending a planned consultation at the outpatient department of the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences Kaunas Hospital in Kaunas, Lithuania. A total of 972 phone calls were made, and 389 telephone surveys were completed. RESULTS: The mean respondents’ waiting time until the planned outpatient consultation was 15.13 ± 10 days. The highest proportion of nonattendance was observed when the wait time was between 6 and 17 days. More often, the patients did not attend the planned outpatient consultation due to worsened health status (24.69%), unidentified personal problems (14.91%), work-related problems (13.62%) and being unaware about the appointment (11.82%). A longer waiting time was significantly associated with the following reasons for nonattendance: work-related problems, health problems solved at another health care institution, unidentified personal problems and unknown reasons for nonattendance. The highest proportions of nonattending patients had consultations registered with neurologists (17.0%), traumatologists (11.3%) and cardiologists (10.5%). CONCLUSIONS: Patients did not identify the long waiting time until outpatient specialist consultation among the main reasons for nonattendance. The issue of waiting time is not an important aspect of nonattendance.
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spelling pubmed-90828802022-05-10 Evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor? Zykienė, Bernadeta Kalibatas, Vytenis BMC Health Serv Res Research BACKGROUND:  Nonattendance is a common problem worldwide. Important factors for nonattendance are a queue or the waiting time until the planned service. AIMS: The aims of this study were to identify the reasons for nonattendance to planned consultations, assess the waiting time from registration to access to an outpatient specialist consultation, and identify the associations between the reasons for nonattendance and the waiting time until the planned outpatient specialist consultation. METHODS: A cross-sectional study based on a phone questionnaire was conducted among patients not attending a planned consultation at the outpatient department of the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences Kaunas Hospital in Kaunas, Lithuania. A total of 972 phone calls were made, and 389 telephone surveys were completed. RESULTS: The mean respondents’ waiting time until the planned outpatient consultation was 15.13 ± 10 days. The highest proportion of nonattendance was observed when the wait time was between 6 and 17 days. More often, the patients did not attend the planned outpatient consultation due to worsened health status (24.69%), unidentified personal problems (14.91%), work-related problems (13.62%) and being unaware about the appointment (11.82%). A longer waiting time was significantly associated with the following reasons for nonattendance: work-related problems, health problems solved at another health care institution, unidentified personal problems and unknown reasons for nonattendance. The highest proportions of nonattending patients had consultations registered with neurologists (17.0%), traumatologists (11.3%) and cardiologists (10.5%). CONCLUSIONS: Patients did not identify the long waiting time until outpatient specialist consultation among the main reasons for nonattendance. The issue of waiting time is not an important aspect of nonattendance. BioMed Central 2022-05-09 /pmc/articles/PMC9082880/ /pubmed/35534875 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-022-08033-y Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Zykienė, Bernadeta
Kalibatas, Vytenis
Evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor?
title Evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor?
title_full Evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor?
title_fullStr Evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor?
title_full_unstemmed Evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor?
title_short Evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor?
title_sort evaluating the reasons for nonattendance to outpatient consultations: is waiting time an important factor?
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9082880/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35534875
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-022-08033-y
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