Increasing patient attendance in a pediatric obesity clinic: a quality improvement project.

Research supports intensive lifestyle interventions (>25 contact hours/six months) to treat childhood obesity. Success requires retention in program. This quality improvement project's purpose was to increase attendance of follow-up patients in a childhood obesity clinic by 10%. A pretest posttest design was used. Three months of baseline data were collected, followed by 52 weeks of intervention data. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Fisher's exact test. Follow-up patient attendance improved significantly from 69% to 81% (z=1.76, p=.039 (95% CI=0.2822, 1.0021)). Simple and inexpensive interventions can significantly increase attendance of obese children in follow-up.