ABSTRACT
In late 1995, the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham undertook an evaluation of the outreach clinics operated by the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust in the West Midlands. This chapter shows non-attendance (DNA) rates varied considerably both between specialties and between hospital-based and outreach outpatient clinics. Outreach clinics had a consistently higher proportion of new referrals than hospital-based clinics. The chapter provides the patients at outreach clinics spent much less time travelling to and from their clinic appointment, and much less time actually at the clinic than those attending hospital-based clinics. There was an interesting difference between the responses of patients surveyed at the hospital clinics visited and those surveyed at outreach clinics. Many of the patients at outreach clinics said that until they had been referred to the clinic, they had not known that the facility existed.
