Nurses' help in psychiatric out-patient clinics

Increasing referrals to psychiatric clinics, combined with restricted medical manpower, require innovative ways of meeting the demands. We appointed a nurse to help in an out-patient clinic. The nurse recorded new patients' case histories and presented them to the consultant, who could then see the patients in less time. In the first 15 months the clinic saw 260 new patients, compared with 190 in the previous period. The median waiting time for appointments came down from 32.5 to 22.5 days ( P =0.018). Patients reported a high level of satisfaction with seeing a nurse and a doctor.