Presentations 2020: Restorative

409 - An audit of FTAs and Cancellations on a specialist endodontic clinic.

L Sadaghiani A Dutta
Presented by: Shivakar Mehrotra
Cardiff Dental Hospital

Numerous patients fail to attend their secondary care appointments. This leads to wasted clinic time. Time that could have been allocated to treat other patients. Waiting times for treatment on for one endodontic clinic is currently quoted at 2 years. In light of this, a retrospective audit was completed to look at the rate of Failure to attend (FTA) and Short notice cancellations (SNC) that occur on that clinic. Our objective was to first collect a random sample of patient notes that were allocated the clinic. Secondly to ascertain how many of these patients had FTA/SNC. Thirdly, record where documented, possible reasons for these missed appointments. Primary care services observe, on average a SNC rate of 5%. Whilst there are certain times where a patient may have to SNC due to unforeseen circumstances, there should not be patients missing appointments without informing the dental hospital. As such, a standard for FTA was 0% and for SNC it was 5%. 133 case notes were looked at of patients allocated to the waiting list between May 2018 and Oct 2019. 35 patients missed their first appointment (5 of those were SNC’s). A further 21 went on to FTA/SNC again. In total 93 appointments were missed by 54 patients. 40.6% of patients seen on the MCD clinic missed at least 1 appointment. 12% of these were SNC. On average appointments booked on the clinic were for 90 minutes. The most frequent reasons cited were patients unable to find parking therefore leaving without attending their appointment; having the tooth extracted whilst on the waiting list and illness. A significant amount of clinic time is wasted by patients not attending their appointment which in turn has had a negative effect on the waiting times of patients on the waiting list.This recommendation of this audit is that a discussion to implement changes to reduce the number of missed appointments is necessary.
Consent Statement: There are no details on individual patients reported within the abstract.

Video