PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Izn Shahab AU - Ryan Meili TI - Examining non-attendance of doctor’s appointments at a community clinic in Saskatoon DP - 2019 Jun 01 TA - Canadian Family Physician PG - e264--e268 VI - 65 IP - 6 4099 - http://www.cfp.ca/content/65/6/e264.short 4100 - http://www.cfp.ca/content/65/6/e264.full SO - Can Fam Physician2019 Jun 01; 65 AB - Objective To quantify the degree of non-attendance of medical appointments, as well as to identify the social reasons behind the missed appointments, at an inner-city primary care clinic.Design Retrospective chart review and survey.Setting Inner-city clinic in Saskatoon, Sask, serving a primarily low-income and First Nations population.Participants Patients with appointments in the clinic between January 2016 and June 2016.Main outcome measures Number of non-attended clinic appointments and the reasons for missed appointments.Results Of the 1976 booked appointments during the study period, 487 (24.6%) appointments were not attended. Among the patients with walk-in appointments, 123 (15.5%) of them left the clinic before seeing a physician. New patients had a high rate of non-attendance (44.4% did not show up to appointments). Among those who did not attend an appointment, 19.9% of them missed more than 1 appointment; 77.8% of missed appointments were made more than a week in advance of the appointment, and 51.7% of those who missed an appointment saw a physician at the clinic at a later date (18.5 days later on average). The most common reasons for non-attendance were forgetting the appointment or feeling too sick to attend. Social determinants such as transportation were also found to play a role in non-attendance. Most survey participants stated that a telephone call reminder would aid them in keeping their appointments.Conclusion Non-attendance is a multifactorial issue that causes a considerable waste of resources, limits the provision of preventive care, and negatively affects patient health. As forgetting was found to be a frequent cause of missed appointments, introducing a telephone reminder system might be an affordable and effective first measure to address non-attendance. Factors associated with poverty and other social determinants of health also affect attendance and are more challenging to address.