Episodes of allied health outpatient care: an investigation of service delivery in acute public hospital settings

This paper describes 'episodes of allied health outpatient care' by linking related clinical allied health outpatient contacts. Episodes were tracked on 10095 patients in 46 public hospital outpatient services in eight hospit als over a 10-month period during 1996. as part of a Commonwealth Ambulator y Care Reform project. Fifty-one per cent of patients completed at least on e 'episode of allied health outpatient care' during the period of the study . An episode theoretically comprised all those occasions of service provide d to the one patient for the one condition in the one allied health outpati ent service, using the one referral. There were difficulties in flagging th e beginning and end of episodes, as services used specific ways of defining and recording episode characteristics. Describing allied health outpatient service usage by episode has implications for developing funding models th at are appropriate to the core business of allied health services.