AbstractsMedical & Health Science

Review of appointment re cords at the family planning clinic of the West Health. Center, Los Angeles County Health Department, showed that 47% of the appointments were not kept. To deal with this high rate of broken appointments, overbooking of patients was practiced. The problem was not solved. This further demonstrated the concept that the availability and accessibility of clinical facilities and services does not mean that they are always acceptable to patients or will be used by them. Achievement of acceptability may require modification of services to meet patient needs rather than personnel demands. A system was proposed to reduce the waiting time for an appointment which in turn might result in reducing the rate of broken appointments. The proposed system utilized the advantages of both the walk-in and appointment systems. A study was carried out, using clinic patients as subjects, that investigated the acceptability of the proposed system by the patients. Too, the study was concerned with determining the variables that might have affected the broken appointment rate. The majority of patients in this study indicated their preference for the proposed system over the existing one. Acceptance of the new system depended on the length of waiting time for an appointment, ie. Significantly more people accepted the proposed system if the waiting time for an appointment had exceeded four weeks. The sample population in this study indicated that they were satisfied with the service s they were receiving at the clinic, and that a "Good" staff-patient relationship existed at the clinic. No other variable s seemed to affect patient s' decision about the proposed system. This lead the investigator to conclude that waiting time for an appointment is highly related to broken appointments at this clinic, and adoption of the proposed system might drastically reduce the broken appointment rate.