Taming the "no-show" tiger: decreasing the rate of absenteeism at educational programs

A multidisciplinary staff development department developed a continuous quality improvement project to study the consistently high absentee rate for scheduled training and its relationship to the class registration process. Data were collected using a 9-question survey of students who failed to attend scheduled training. Findings show that changes to the class registration process resulted in a decrease in the number of absentees under the control of the staff development department from an average of 43% to 6% by the end of the year-long review period. The overall absentee rate stabilized at 20% and has been established as the benchmark for this setting.