Outpatient follow up

BMJ 1995;311:1315-1316 (18 November)

Editorials

Outpatient follow up

Who benefits: doctors or patients?

One of the first questions that trainee surgeons learn to aska new boss before the first outpatient clinic gets under wayis, "Do you routinely follow up all your patients?" The reasonthe question needs asking is that some consultants do and othersdon't. The paper in this issue by Alison Waghorn and colleagues(p 1344) confirms this impression.¹ According to their surveyof 100 randomly selected general surgeons, the decision to offeran outpatient appointment depended largely on the consultant'sview of outpatient visits in general. The bimodal distributionof responses showed that some surgeons offered appointmentsto almost all their patients, irrespective of diagnosis or procedure,while others followed up almost none.

In keeping with this observation, a recent review of individualurological services in the South West Thames area of Londonshowed that from 1991 to 1994, urological provider units were. . . [Full text of this article]

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