The amount of time that one consultant urologist wasted on unnecessary administration while seeing outpatients was noted over six weeks. Searching for missing clinical data and the time spent on non-medical clerical tasks took up nearly half of the consultant's sessions. This seemed to be due to insufficient clerical and secretarial staff. Because low salaries are offered to such staff vast sums of money are being paid to agencies who are providing an appreciable number (40%) of the secretarial staff in our hospitals.Urgent action from the government is needed to remedy this and thus make substantial reductions in outpatient waiting lists nationally. It would greatly improve morale in this important sector of the health service without increasing total costs. IntroductionThe Department of Health and Social Security and the government are regularly castigated in the national press for the increasing waiting lists for hospital outpatient attendances. Despite this we were unable to find any published studies that dealt with the efficiency of the doctor-patient interview.Many clinicians have reluctantly become accustomed to the lack of adequate secretarial and clerical support. In more and more hospitals in the health service patients are being seen and even operated on without all the relevant clinical data to hand. Though administrators and managers are always collecting data, which they circulate among themselves, this seems to have little effect on the problems identified by both clinicians and patients. We have documented the activities of one consultant urologist at a district general hospital in an inner city area in the hope that other studies will be carried out and solutions will be found to better the lot of the patient and frustrated hospital staff.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract