Interprofessional Collaboration for Improved Appointment Management: A Narrative Review of Integrating Secretarial and Nursing Roles

Background: The effective scheduling and follow-up of appointments for patients is essential for the delivery of healthcare. Ineffective scheduling and follow-up processes increase costs through missed appointments and reduced patient continuity of care, resulting from long wait times (days or weeks). Integrating the role of nurses and secretaries makes logical sense. Nurses have the clinical experience, and secretaries are accustomed to working in an administrative capacity. There is a potential to improve costs and services by merging complexities. Aim: This narrative review aims to investigate how the integration of roles enhances scheduling and follow-up, examines barriers and facilitators, and considers technology to support the integration. Methods: Published peer-reviewed articles were selected between 2020 and 2024 from PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, and Web of Science based on themes of nursing-secretarial integration, scheduling, and follow-up. Results: Integrative models of nursing and secretarial roles reduce no-show rates by 20-25% and improve patient satisfaction by 30%, while enhancing coordinated care, leading to reductions in readmissions of 10-15%. Barriers to integration include role uncertainty, educational needs, and technology difficulties, while electronic health records, portals, and phone applications facilitate integration. Conclusion: Nursing and secretarial roles in healthcare are ripe for genuine integration to improve both scheduling and follow-up. Integration requires education, technology, investment, and policy change to address the barriers to effective delivery and creation of a new role, with focused attention on standardization and achieving health equity. Future research in this area should address research questions focused on scale.