The practice has a policy to remove patients who repeatedly miss appointments as missed appointments cost the NHS approximately £216 Million per year and increase waiting times for everyone.
There are times when there are very valid reasons for missing an appointment such as being admitted to hospital or a family emergency and we will take this into consideration.
What happens if I miss an appointment?
If this is your first missed appointment we simply send you a letter with the advice below on what you can do to help in future.
What you can do to help
- Cancel your appointment if you can’t make it. The more time you give us the better but even a few minutes before hand is better than none at all.
- Make sure we have your up to date mobile number so that you get a reminder text ahead of your appointment – you can then reply with the word Cancel as an easy way to cancel your appointment
- Sign up to online services so that you can make, change or cancel your appointment even when we are closed.
- If you are able then write down your appointment yourself – this has been shown to improve recall of dates and times more than if someone else does it for you.
- Don’t book too far in advance or ‘just in case’ if you don’t need to – the further people book ahead the higher the rates of people not turning up.
- Tell us if you think there is something else we could be doing to help – you can feedback about this or anything else via our website, www.tredegarpractice.nhs.uk, or via forms at reception.
What happens if you continue to miss appointments
If you miss a second appointment in the next 6 months then you will be placed on ‘probation’ for the next 12 months. A further missed appointment in that time will lead to a final warning. Another missed appointment in the same 12 months (the fourth in 12 months overall) will lead to you being removed from our list. If there are mitigating circumstances around any missed appointments please tell us and we will take this into account.
In the last 90 days Free Text Prompt % of patients attended their appointments at the practice – in future please be one of them as missed appointments cost the NHS approximately £216 Million per year (please see overleaf for more info) and increase waiting times for everyone.
*Missed GP Appointments Costing NHS Millions
There are around 307 million sessions scheduled with GPs, nurses, therapists and other practice staff every year and 5% – one in twenty – are missed without enough notice to invite other patients. That works out as around 15.4 million missed slots.
Of these, around 7.2million are with busy family doctors, which adds up to more than 1.2 million GP hours wasted each year – the equivalent of over 600 GPs working full time for a year.
Each appointment costs an average of £30, putting the total cost to the NHS at more than £216million pounds on top of the disruption for staff and fellow patients that would pay for:
- The annual salary of 2,325 full time GPs
- 224, 640 cataract operations
- 58,320 hip replacement operations
- 216,000 drug treatment courses for Alzheimer’s
- The annual salary of 8, 424 full time community nurses’
Taken from https://www.england.nhs.uk/2019/01/missed-gp-appointments-costing-nhs-millions/
