Outpatient clinic: where is the delay?

In outpatient clinics, consultation times are often eroded by extraneous activities. We measured the components of each outpatient episode in 167 patients attending a general urology follow-up clinic. 41% of time in the clinic was spent away from the patient-administration 17%, disturbances 15%, finding results 9%. The inefficiencies had changed little since a study in the same setting thirteen years earlier. Since then, parallel nurse-practitioner-run clinics have been introduced in the hope of giving consultants longer with the patient; however, time with each patient is now 4.8 min compared with a previous 7.6 min. The most easily addressed inefficiencies are those relating to missing information, such as radiology reports.

Hemispheric asymmetry of electrocortical responses to speech stimuli.

In a group of normal adults, averaged cortical evoked responses to natural speech stimuli were recorded from scalp electrodes placed symmetrically over the two cerebral hemispheres at frontal, Rolandic, and temporoparietal leads. The amplitude of the most prominent component was consistently larger in left hemisphere derivations, with the major hemisphere difference observed in the temporoparietal records. These electrophysiological measures may be sensitive indicators of hemispheric specialization of function.