Effects of Health Education Methods on Appointment Breaking: Study of Patients with Suspected Glaucoma

Visiting the Dentist: A Behavioral Community Analysis of Participation in a Dental Health Screening and Referral Program

“…Prompting and reinforcement strategies assume the target population has the skills to obtain the services (Milio, 1967). Glogow (1970) evaluated several procedures including a problem-solving technique to increase participation in a follow-up retesting program for glaucoma. A 25min discussion between the patient and nurse about arrangements for transportation, babysitting, and ways to be excused from work did not result in greater compliance as compared to other "educational techniques."…”

Personality Type of the Glaucoma Patient

“…In a study of 589 subjects, Odberg et al 22 found that 80% had negative emotions upon their diagnosis of glaucoma and one-third were afraid of going blind. Glogow et al, 23 showed that >50% of newly diagnosed glaucoma patients were fearful of going blind and that 1 year later, these same subjects were abnormally anxious. Likewise, Spaeth 24 showed that 53% of glaucoma patients who were interviewed were ''afraid of going blind someday.''…”

“…22,23,25 Examples of this exist for other medical illnesses [26][27][28][29][30][31] and such phenomenon fall under the topic of illness cognition and behavior which has been reported upon extensively. 28,[32][33][34] Thus, the findings in our study may be a result of the diagnosis of glaucoma rather than the disease state itself.…”

The Effect of Exit-Interview Patient Education on No-Show Rates at a Family Practice Residency Clinic

“…Two previous studies have reported that personal attention in the form of patient education improves attendance at follow-up visits. 28,29 These studies suggest that personal attention may be more important than educational content in improving attendance at follow-up visits. Although we cannot disentangle the effects of education and personal communication of clinic policies in our study, our results would tend to confirm the effectiveness of personal attention.…”

“…Hertz and Stamps 27 attributed a rise in broken appointments to a breakdown in communication on the part of the health center under study. Several studies have looked at the effect of face-to-face patient education in reducing the no-show rate, 28,29 but face-to-face patient interventions aimed specifically at addressing the noshow problem in a general patient population have not been studied.…”