Supply and Demand: Estimating the Real Need for Care While Meeting the 48 Hour Waiting Time Target in a Genitourinary Medicine Clinic by a Closed Appointment System

Aim: To attempt to assess demand for access to sexual health services in a community where a "closed" appointment system operates in the local genitourinary medicine (GUM) clinic.

Setting: A large GUM clinic serving a provincial city in England. Appointments for new episodes are available only 1 or 2 days ahead. Service user complaints about repeated difficulty in getting through to book a visit prompted a review of all methods of access.

Methods: A prospective review of all calls received in the departmental telephone booking service was performed. Temporary extra staff manned a cascade sequence of telephone lines and recorded all calls and caller characteristics such as age and declaration of symptoms. All attempts to book an appointment in person, by written referral, or by telephone in a period of 5 working days were also logged. This total demand was compared with the actual capacity and maximum theoretical capacity of the clinic during the same time period.

Results: 626 appointments would be required in the working week to accommodate all patients within 48 hours of requesting to be seen. 84% of all calls requested a new appointment, and 77% all new appointment requests were by phone. There were 181 new appointments available; 72% of those requesting an appointment could not be seen. The clinic was working at 103% capacity. To accommodate demand at this quiet time of the academic year, the GUM service would need to increase capacity by 3-4-fold.

Conclusions: Closed appointment systems in GUM services may produce an apparent "improvement" in waiting times to 48 hours, but many callers are not able to book an appointment at all. Demand for GUM services outstrips capacity to an extent that internal efficiency savings cannot hope to address.