A patient survey of out-of-hours care provided by Emergency Care Practitioners

BMC Emergency Medicine

Table 1 Reasons for excluding potential participants and non-respondents

Exclusion stage	Reason for exclusion	n	% within stage
Prior to contacting patients (of n = 174)	No telephone number recorded	6	3.5
	Dementia documented	2	1.1
	No record that the patient had received a study information sheet¹	55	31.6
	Subtotal	63	36.2
On patient contact (of n = 111)	No reply to telephone call	29	26.1
	Patient declined to participate	1	0.9
	Subtotal	30	27.0

¹Careful examination of patients who had not received a study information sheet found that the majority had received visits on seven specific days within the thirty day study period, suggesting that these exclusions reflect a general failure to deliver study information sheets rather than the selective exclusion of specific types of patients during the course of the study.

ISSN: 1471-227X