Improving attendance at intake in children's outpatient services of a community mental health centre

Abstract

Concern that non-attendance at initial appointments may lead to increased delays for new clients attempting to enter treatment, led to the development of an intervention to improve attendance at intake in children's out-patients services of a community mental health centre. The new procedure encouraged parents who telephoned the centre to come into children's services to complete a behaviour checklist on their child before receiving an initial appointment time. In the sample of 464 consecutive initial appointments scheduled over the study period, there was a reduction in the broken appointment rate from 37.7% during baseline to 26.5% during the intervention phase. Although this was a simple, flexible and inexpensive intervention, it is suggested that the result is replicated with a controlled experimental design, and interventions are tailored to specific types of attendance problems.