Psychiatric outpatient in general hospital: characterization of user’s appointment compliance

Abstract

The mental and behavioral disorders are important causes of morbidity and incapacitation all over the world. The success in the treatment of such disorders require a prolonged follow up, which nowadays tend to be developed in open services. This is a descriptive, retrospective and cross-sectional study that aimed to characterize the users’ attendance to consultations at an outpatient clinic psychiatric service in the interior of São Paulo in 2004. Therefore, data were collected from the Medical Filing Service of the institution and subject to analysis. The results showed that 30% of the patients missed 50% or more of the appointments. Such finding evidences that there are users who do not adhere satisfactorily to the follow up, which points to the need of investigating the factors that lead to the non-adherence of these patients.