User satisfaction with commuter walk-in centres

INTRODUCTION

There are currently over 80 walk-in centres in England, located in a variety of settings, most of which offer a nurse-led service. A national evaluation of 40 walk-in centres found that 80% of users were ‘very satisfied’ with the service received.1 In 2004 the government announced a pilot of seven walk-in centres specifically aimed at people travelling to work by train. These commuter walk-in centres have different aims, and client groups who may have different experiences and satisfaction. In particular, short waiting times may be more important to commuters. As part of a wider evaluation of commuter walk-in centres, reported in an accompanying paper,2 satisfaction levels with this new service were measured.

METHOD

A survey was undertaken to determine how the centres were used and satisfaction with different aspects of care. A user questionnaire was developed, based on one used in the evaluation of general walk-in centres and interviews of users of the new service.1 The questionnaire had two parts: the first part, for completion before the consultation, covered reasons for using the walk-in centre, commuting status, and sociodemographic details; the second part, for completion after the consultation, covered waiting time, treatment, referral, and satisfaction. The intention was to ask 600 users in each centre to complete a questionnaire, totalling 3600. Six ‘questionnaire days’ were selected, when reception staff would hand a questionnaire to all attendees that day. On these days reception staff were asked to give every user an information sheet, questionnaire, and reply-paid envelope. Responders could choose to return the completed questionnaire to a box in the reception or post it back to the research team in a reply-paid envelope. No reminders were sent to non-responders. In practice, there were between 10 and 14 ‘questionnaire days’ in each centre, mainly due to lower than expected numbers using the service.2

Responses were entered into SPSS (version 14) for analysis. Descriptive statistics were calculated for all survey questions, and comparisons made between individual centres. Differences between centres were tested using χ2 for proportions. Clustering by centre was taken into account when calculating 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for key estimates, by using the ‘regress’ command with the ‘cluster’ option in STATA (version 9.2).

RESULTS

Reasons for using the commuter walk-in centres

The questionnaire asked for the main reasons for attending the service that day (Figure 1). The two most frequent reasons were convenience of the service and that it was quicker to get an appointment than in general practice. Only 12% (225/1815) of survey responders reported that they used it because they travelled to work, whereas 40% (726/1815) used it because they worked. If the service had not been available, 54% (918/1703) of users reported they would have visited their general practice and 11% (196/1703) an emergency department, while 15% (258/1703) would have looked after the problem themselves.

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Figure 1

Main reasons for choosing commuter walk-in centre rather than elsewhere (n = 1815).

DISCUSSION