Does Client Self-Booking Reduce 'Did Not Attends' (Dnas) In A Counselling Service?

An important problem for our counselling service is the high number of clients who 'did not attend' (DNA) for their booked appointment. This paper aims to describe how we tackled this problem within our counselling service by using a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle (Langley, Nolan Norman and Provost, 1996). The results found that by devising a system whereby clients could self-book their appointments we were able to reduce the DNA rate for first appointments from 31.70% to 2%. This has useful time and financial implications. We would expect that the self-booking approach we have outlined here is adaptable for other counselling services.