Research Summary: Do appointment reminders work?

Objectives To evaluate the effect of issuing a patient reminder plus a confirmation slip on the attendance of orthodontic new patients. Setting Department of Orthodontics, University Dental Hospital of Manchester. Design A randomised controlled trial. Method New patients were randomly allocated to: Outcome measures Patient attendance at the clinic. Results A total of 232 patients were entered into the study between 18/06/2001 and 29/08/2001. These were randomly allocated to 115 (49.8%) in the reminder group and 116 (50.2%) in the no reminder group. If the patient received a reminder and returned the confirmation they were less likely to fail the appointment than if they did not receive a reminder (OR 0.4, 95% CI 0.2 to 0.96) There was an effect of social deprivation, if the patients lived in an area of high social deprivation they were 2.7 (95% CI 1.1 to 6.5) times more likely to fail to attend an appointment than people who were more affluent. Conclusions The use of postal reminders for orthodontic consultation appointments appears to result in a useful increase of appointments that are kept or cancelled in advance.