After experiencing disappointment due to numerous patients not turning up to their memory assessment service (MAS) appointments as well as the effect of losing man-hours due to this we decided to investigate how best to improve the attendance rates of our MAS patients. The initial frustration occurred when several patients for multiple team members were not attending their appointments. When followed up they stated that they had not received the required letters or follow up telephone calls prompting them to attend their appointments. This led to the initial hypotheses that a formal structure was required in part to aid in the delivery of this service and improve attendance.

We initially investigated the percentage of patient's that did not attend their appointments from the period of August 2022 to December 2022. This was achieved utilising the trust's data collection team. From these initial raw data we processed and calculated the delay between appointment allocation and a letter being sent out as well as basic percentages of patients not attending each month. What we realised was that there was no strict average and our admin team were not aware of any pathway that they could utilise as a guideline for the management of patient appointments. We therefore outlined the overall process of the appointment pathway and formed this. Upon this foundation we subsequently ironed out the optimal points of contact between our admin team and patients and when this could be accomplished and documented. The aims of these points of contact overall was to improve the rates of patients not attending their appointments and improving our target of appointment attendance. We subsequently re-evaluated our patient attendance five months after the formation of the posters, which were affixed in the admin and memory nurse rooms at our base.

The results overall were quite promising and did appear to show a change based upon the formalisation of the MAS appointment pathway.

The results showed a positive improvement to the attendance rate of the MAS patients and also demonstrated the empowerment that a team can have when a formal pathway is in place. This fully completed audit cycle demonstrated the importance of such a pathway and how to address what is often a multi-faceted problem for many community based services. Our conclusion appears to support our hypotheses that a formal pathway can often improve the provision of a service.