Outpatient Clinics: Efficiency and Cost Implications

Peripheral outpatient clinics: use, costs, and benefits.

A census was taken of outpatient bookings at all hospitals and health centres in Oxfordshire for the main medical and surgical specialities. Nine per cent of all bookings were to peripheral clinics (that is, those outsie the two main medical centres at Oxford and Banbury). About half of all bookings in the area were made to clinics within three of four miles of the patients' homes. The work loa...

Specialty Outpatient Clinics: agility and resolution.

In Brazil, the struggle to build an universal, accessible and quality health system can be mistaken at first for an effort to redemocratize of our country, and may be characterized by a resistance to the conservative movement regarding public policies of the last decade. In 1986, the most important health political event of the second half of the Twentieth Century occured: the VIII National Hea...

E-Health at Outpatient Clinics in Uganda

Predicting Intermittent Atrial Fibrillation in Outpatient Clinics

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Palpitations are the most common complaint in cardiology outpatient clinics. These palpitations may be derived from paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (AF) and can be easily overlooked. It is unclear whether inter-atrial conduction time (ICT) may predict the paroxysmal AF in out-patients that present with palpitations. We evaluated the ability of the ICT to predict paroxys...

General practitioners ' referrals to specialist outpatient clinics

There has been much concern about the wide variations in general practitioners' referral rates and the consequent implications for cost and quality of care. This has led to a call to evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of referrals. A collaborative audit of referrals to outpatient clinics was conducted by 127 general practitioners in 33 practices in the Oxford region. Records were ke...