Thousands of patients skip doctor's appointments

4:00pm Monday 4th February 2013 in News Exclusive By Will Lodge

Project manager Elaine Appleyard, of Parsons Heath Medical Centre, highlighting the amount of missed appointments. Project manager Elaine Appleyard, of Parsons Heath Medical Centre, highlighting the amount of missed appointments.

THOUSANDS of GP appointments are wasted every year as patients fail to cancel them if they cannot attend.

North East Essex NHS said 55,000 doctor and nurse appointments were not attended last year.

The figure has been described as totally unacceptable by health bosses who are unable to put a cost on the problem but say it means other patients risk missing out while staff have to work longer hours.

  • Read the full story and what surgeries are doing to counter the problem in Monday's Gazette.

Comments(8)

Scoot says...
5:00pm Mon 4 Feb 13

Surely the solution is for the surgeries to have an alert when a patient rings up again for an appointment on their computer systems. Then those patients that haven't been bothered to cancel an appointment should be made to come at the end of the surgery time and then have to wait until the end when Drs have treated all the other cases.

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Im_Like_HELLO says...
7:38pm Mon 4 Feb 13

Or perhaps the patients in question should be invoiced for wasting NHS (and therefore taxpayers') time.

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itsmyopinionthatcounts says...
7:39pm Mon 4 Feb 13

Scoot wrote:
Surely the solution is for the surgeries to have an alert when a patient rings up again for an appointment on their computer systems. Then those patients that haven't been bothered to cancel an appointment should be made to come at the end of the surgery time and then have to wait until the end when Drs have treated all the other cases.
How do you "make" somebody come at the end of surgery. If they don't turn up for their appts then they obviously have no intention of coming at all !!

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wardyt says...
1:23pm Tue 5 Feb 13

Fine them £50 a time!

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romantic says...
1:34pm Tue 5 Feb 13

Fining people should be a last resort. Quite possibly, many of these people simply forget they have an appointment. And many of them probably feel better and decide they don´t need the appointment any more. They may think that it is OK not to show up because the doctor will be able to fit other people in during that time.

If somebody does this more than a couple of times, maybe write to them and explain why they should cancel if they can´t come. If they do it many times, then something has to be worked out. It is, I´m afraid, part of the joy and wonder of dealing with the public...

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Scoot says...
1:54pm Tue 5 Feb 13

itsmyopinion - you can't make someone attend but if someone who has not turned up for an appointment is given the last appointment at a surgery then those that don't pitch up won't waste time. You could have say 5 or 6 people given the last time as some surgeries do for emergencies. Then you have to sit there for a lengthy time until you get seen. Maybe if some of the timewasters had their time wasted it might sink in that they have to consider others.

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wellnow says...
2:09pm Tue 5 Feb 13

Is this a country wide statistic? There are 64 million people in this country and 365 days in the year.l would rather see the figures as a % of appointments made.then you could make a judgment as to the severity of the problem.

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Joker50 says...
2:17pm Tue 5 Feb 13

I think with most people either get better or die before they get chance to see doctors or nurses, the dead cant cancel and the ones who have got better probably say to hell with it.

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