OVER the course of 12 months more than 76,400 GP practice appointments were missed in Wiltshire, leading to £2.7million of pressured finances being wasted and the equivalent total population of Trowbridge and Salisbury not being able to get an appointment when they needed one.
Between July 2016 and June 2017, Wiltshire’s 50 GP practices were recording an average of 29 missed GP, practice nurse and healthcare assistant appointments every week. Known as ‘Did Not Attends, missed appointments have a huge impact on the health economy, preventing other patients from being seen and wastes practitioners’ valuable time.
At the White Horse Health Centre and Bratton Surgery, in the last 12 months 6,219 appointments have been missed – this equates to 2,101 hours. At the Smallbrook Surgery, 1,151 appointments were missed.
Marie Strachan, deputy practice manager at the White Horse Health Centre said, “The missed appointments at our practices over the last year have been significantly high. We want to encourage our patients to cancel their appointments in advance if they are unable to attend. Patients do not need to hold in the telephone queue to do this; Option 1 on the telephone system allows you to do this by an automated service. We offer a text reminder system, but if patients change their mobile numbers, they need to update us at the surgery so this service continues to be efficient.
“Patients who do not attend their appointments are preventing others from being seen quicker. This is very frustrating for the practice staff, clinicians and our patients who have to wait longer than necessary to book an appointment.”
Most Wiltshire practices have multiple ways to make cancelling an appointment easy at any time of day including online systems, dedicated telephone lines with answer machine facilities and text messaging services. Speak to your practice receptionist to find out what’s available at your practice to help make cancelling appointments easy for you, your family and friends.
The reported number of missed appointments wasted £2.7million of public money, which could have been spent on over 63,000 hours of nursing hours in a GP practice, or used to pay for: • 324 heart bypasses, • 2,853 cataract operations, or • 711 treatments for stroke.
