Using telephone prompts to improve initial attendance at a community mental health center.

Contacting patients by telephone before their appointment has been shown to increase clinic attendance in various settings. However, no such studies have been conducted in New Zealand, which has a unique mix of publicly funded secondary care and largely privately funded primary care. A controlled prospective study of telephone prompting was carried out in a New Zealand publicly funded community mental health center. One group of 190 patients was phoned the day before their initial appointment, and their attendance rate was compared with that of 496 patients not phoned. Ninety-six percent of the patients who were successfully contacted kept their appointment, compared with 76 percent of those not contacted.