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Quality improvement report
Improving waiting times in the orthopaedic outpatient clinic
  1. Julia Street1,
  2. Wajeeha Khan2,
  3. Aureola Tong3,
  4. Vasudev Shanbhag4
  1. 1 Department of Trauma and Orthopaedics, Morriston Hospital, Morriston, UK
  2. 2 Department of Medicine, Morriston Hospital, Morriston, UK
  3. 3 Department of Trauma and Orthopaedics, University Hospital Wales, Cardiff, UK
  4. 4 Department of Trauma and Orthopaedics, Nevill Hall Hospital, Abergavenny, UK
  1. Correspondence to Julia Street, Department of Trauma and Orthopaedics, Morriston Hospital, Heol Maes Eglwys, Morriston, Swansea SA6 6NL, Wales, UK; juliastreet{at}doctors.org.uk

Abstract

Background Reducing waiting times for patients is a worthy goal for all healthcare professionals. The means and ability to carry out nerve conduction studies in the hand outpatient clinic has the potential to reduce waiting times between appointments for patients with upper limb neural compression.

Methods We assessed the pathway of patients presenting with upper limb neural compression in the Aneurin Bevan Trust. Overall, 115 patients were included, being assessed in four different patient pathway groups.

Results We found that by implementing a nerve conduction clinic, and then that of a one stop clinic, we were able to reduce the median waiting times from referral to surgical intervention, to 133 days.

Conclusion The introduction of nerve conduction clinics allowed the one stop clinic to be established, achieving the goal of reducing patient waiting times.

  • quality improvement
  • patient satisfaction
  • patient-centred care

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjoq-2017-000067

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors All authors have been active contributors to the paper.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.