What's the Hold Up: Using quality improvement processes to decrease appointment wait times for new radiation therapy patients in a large academic cancer centre.

Abstract

Purpose: Appointment delays have a negative effect on radiation therapy patient experience, increase stress for radiation therapists trying to maintain a tight treatment schedule and impact costs when delays lead to overtime. Our radiation therapy department administers external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) to 300 patients per day. Appointment delays are frequently mentioned by patients in an ongoing patient experience survey as an area where improvement is needed. The purpose of this project was to use quality improvement (QI) methods to identify sources of delay and initiate improvements to reduce delays for EBRT patients.