Referals

i am working in a musculoske;etal outpatients and we a have the ususal headaches of waiting lists.we are looking at casebanding our referals in terms of how much time a ceratin condition needs and i was wondering if anyone has any experience of this. at present our referals are triaged into acut,asap and routine but all referrals receive a set 40min assessmnet abd 20 min follow up sessions.
also if anyone has any waiting list removla revelations would be very grateful!
regards Helen

At one time we set aside 1 experienced physio in O/P dept to screen all referrals. This had the huge advantage of sifting out the inappropriate ones, and those that needed to be in a more suitable environment -eg with community physios. however the dept was so depleted by cutbacks this wasn't feasible to continue with. If you can spare someone for a set time each week to deal with the non-acute referrals, for example, considerable time can be saved and GPs etc educated to other ways of managing patients.

HI Helen. in terms of time do you mean length of treatment time or number of sessions.

I would think a good way forward is the development of a step down process. i.e. Triage and assessment. then individual treatment for 4-6 sessions maximum, then a group class for 6-8 weeks, followed by a followup check at 3 months. The patients should not be able to reapply to the triage level with the same condition during the 3-4 month period (stopping repeated waiting list offenders/squatters)