Missed Appointments and DNA’s
Do you feel frustrated when you cannot get an appointment?
Every year wasted appointments cost NHS £162 million. This can cause serious delays in treatment for other patients.
On average approximately 90 patients each month Did Not Attend (DNA) their appointment. This means the patient did not turn up for the appointment and did not contact the surgery in advance to cancel or change the appointment. This currently results in approximately 22 hours of wasted clinical time each month.
Please call ahead if you think you no longer want your appointment, so it can be offered to someone who needs it.
If you are running late for your appointment, we may have to ask you to re-book.
Late for an appointment
It is important that you arrive in good time for your appointments. Please give it the same importance to your GP appointments, as you would do for a flight for a long deserved holiday.
Often patients who arrive late for an appointment try and justify this by saying that I have been for an appointment before, when the doctor or nurse was running late. This is usually the case when we have to deal with clinical emergencies or patients with complex needs who may need a little more time, so we would appreciate your understanding in these situations. Our clinicians are not actually late for work but have had to deal with unplanned patient situations, which can sometimes not wait.
Hope you will understand that whilst we have a duty of care to our patients, we also have the same duty of care for our staff. We have to ensure that our staff wellbeing and work-life balance is maintained, so they can safely look after you.
For your safety, you would not want your bus driver to be tired on a long journey and you should equally not want your clinicians to be tired whilst treating you and looking after your health care needs. So help us to help you by ensuring you arrive on time for your appointments.
To help you understand, if you compare an appointment with a bus:
- You arrive at a bus stop early, you have to wait for the bus. The same applies to an appointment.
- You arrive at the bus stop late, the bus will not wait for you. You will have to wait for the next bus. The same applies to an appointment slot, as the time slot will have passed and you may have to re-book.
- You arrive at the bus stop and the bus is running late, you wait for it. Same applies if a clinician is running late.
