The General Practitioner Barium Meal Service

introduction The radiology departments at Southmead and Ham Green Hospitals, Bristol, have provided a general practitioner service for general work and barium meals for some years. Unfortunately, the pressure of hospital inpatient and out-patient work led to a waiting period of from three to six months for non-urgent general practitioner barium meal requests. The appointment of one ?f us (C.J.) to an additional consultant post in 1966 provided for an additional two sessions of general Practitioner work. Since then, "Non-urgent" barium meal requests from 9eneral practitioners have been carried out within two or three weeks of receipt of the request and "Urgent" cases are examined, as a rule, within the week, that is to say, as quickly as "Urgent" requests from the hospital out-patient department. This general practitioner barium meal service is now reasonably efficient in terms of waiting lists and closely approximates to that provided to the hospital out-patient department. A prospective study of the incidence of abnormal findings in this group of patients and in Patients referred from the out-patient clinics was therefore made. The abnormal findings in in-patients is included but these are clearly selected cases and not strictly comparable with cases referred by general Practitioners.