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Mobile telephone text messaging of clinic appointments in psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Andrew Donaldson
Affiliation:
Perth City Community Mental Health Team, 8 St Leonard's Bank, Perth PH1 5HH, Australia, email: andrew.donaldson@nhs.net
Ziad Tayar
Affiliation:
Perth City Community Mental Health Team, Perth, Australia
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Abstract

Type
The columns
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2009

Psychiatric out-patient clinics can have a high non-attendance rate. Department of Health figures for England showed 19.1% of appointments in mental health clinics were missed compared with an overall figure of 11.7% for all specialties (Department of Health, 2003). Many strategies have emerged to try to improve attendance and, more recently, trials of short-message-service appointment reminders have been reported in other specialties (Reference Downer, Meara, Da Costa and SethuramanDowner et al, 2006; Reference Geraghty, Glynn, Amin and KinsellaGeraghty et al, 2008; Reference Koshy, Car and MajeedKoshy et al, 2008). These have reduced non-attendance rates and have been inexpensive to run. There do not appear to be any studies involving text-message appointment reminders in mental health services and we decided to carry out a feasibility study in our general adult psychiatry out-patient clinics.

Unfortunately, we identified some unexpected difficulties. In our random sample of 50 patients, 38 (76%) owned a mobile telephone, which is in keeping with the national average. Of these 38 people, however, only 74% could remember their telephone number and only 53% were agreeable to being contacted by text message.

Short-message-service appointment reminders do, on the surface, appear to be a potentially useful and cost-effective method of improving psychiatric out-patient clinic attendance rates. Our study, however, highlights some difficulties in maximising the effectiveness of such a service and it seems unlikely that psychiatric clinics would provide as impressive results as those reported in other settings.

References

Department of Health (2003) Hospital Activity Statistics. Department of Health.Google Scholar
Downer, S. R., Meara, J. G., Da Costa, A. C., & Sethuraman, K. (2006) SMS text messaging improves outpatient attendance. Australian Health Review, 30, 389–386.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Geraghty, M., Glynn, F., Amin, M., & Kinsella, J. (2008) Patient mobile telephone ‘text’ reminder: a novel way to reduce non-attendance at the ENT out-patient clinic. Journal of Laryngology and Otology, 122, 296298.Google Scholar
Koshy, E., Car, J. & Majeed, A. (2008) Effectiveness of mobile-phone short message service (SMS) reminders for ophthalmology outpatient appointments: observational study. BMC Ophthalmology, 8, 914.Google Scholar
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