COMPARISON OF A COMMUNITY CLINIC WITH A HOSPITAL OUTPATIENT-CLINIC INRHEUMATOLOGY

Community clinics are increasingly advocated as a way of delivering sp ecialist health care. In this study, a hospital-based clinic is compar ed to a rotating community clinic in terms of descriptive consultation data, patient satisfaction, case mix and cost. Among other things, co mmunity clinics were more local (1.6 vs 4.9 miles), involved less wait ing for the first appointment (47 vs 27% seen within 1 month), provide d longer consultation times (49 vs 31% 20 min appointments) and produc ed more satisfactory consultations (82 vs 52% said their questions wer e always answered). Consultation data, however, showed that less patie nts were seen in the community clinic (8.6 vs 14.1 patients/doctor/cli nic), with a higher old/new ratio (6.04 vs 3.96) and the cost per pati ent was higher (pound 15.93 vs pound 10.35). No differences were found in the case-mix data.