Why is it completely the patients fault if an appointment is missed?
Turns out for the last year, that Tayside have been sending some of mrs_oab’s appointments to our old house in Sheffield (5 years since we left, pre moving here…)…and another half dozen or so were sent out with a day or two notice.
I wonder how many actually look at their own botched appointment record…

Posting to the wrong place?

Oh teh ironing 😆

Aye, well no-one sent me a reminder to the right email like…. 😆

It has amused me for a few years that my wife’s hairdresser has a more sophisticated approach to appointment management/reminders than her hospital clinic! She gets (automated) text message reminders from the hair dresser and they have an electronic system for ‘disseminating’ cancellations to people wanting a slot. In contrast her clinic books appointments 12 months in advance and sends no reminders at all; randomly cancels clinics at short notice and has no system to deal with patients who can’t attend at the nominated time (come next year!). This is for a fairly serious chronic condition that consumes a major chunk of NHS budget.

We will have been recorded as “DNA” for our daughter because they sent out an appointment with 3 days notice during the summer holidays when half the country was on holiday! Was this for a life saving treatment? Or had a vital complex piece of equipment suddenly become available? Or an urgent referal from a GP that was unexpected? No, it was for a routine pre-school eye check! They’ve had 5 years to work out when to do it!

Hah – try dealing with the Procurator Fiscal or Scottish Courts Service if you want to see incompetence on a truly epic scale 😉

When i go to my outpatients clinics, they say, come back in 6 months. So I take my card to the desk, they say “No you can’t get a time now, we’ll post you an appointment”. So they send me an appointment for some random time that, sometimes, I can’t attend. So, I phone the number, which never answers. So eventually I leave a message saying, how about some other time? To which they do not reply… Until I get a rude letter telling me about how I missed my appointment.

In the last few years I’ve “missed” appointments that I cancelled, I’ve “missed” appointments that I never knew I had, and just once I missed an appointment that to this day, I have no idea what it was for. Oh and one time I did accidentally miss an appointment due to screwing up my diary, which I felt really bad about. But I do wonder how many of these are missed by the patient, and how many are missed for them.

OTOH, I did attend a diabetic clinic a while back where every patient turned up, and it was pandemonium- and all day I heard staff grumbling about how everyone had turned up and they didn’t have enough staff for that. So I assume there’s shrinkage built in.

Hope this doesn’t sound like NHS bashing, I love the NHS and I owe them a great deal but I wouldn’t run an office like that, and if I did I wouldn’t complain when appointments are missed.

It’s a bit like Benefit ‘fraud’:

Fraud costs +£5bn – no, fraud costs £1bn, errors cost £4bn

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/how-much-does-benefit-fraud-cost/

My normal comment (as an Auditor of +20 years) is “I’ve discovered two cases of fraud in 20 years, but see incompetence every day”.

It’s useless here in England too. A letter arrived for an appointment for my mother, at the very hospital where she’d died the previous month. 😐

Needless to say, they got short shrift from me on the phone.

I’ve an appointment tomorrow, as I’ve been reminded every day for the past week by an automated system that keeps calling me. NOt gonna miss it as i want to get this bloody cast off even for just 5 minutes

Yeah, but just think how much worse the appointments system will be when its all been privatised, eh?

Personally I think the NHS is pretty good. When you get to speak with someone on a face to face basis whether its a doctor or nurse they generally do a good job and treat patient well.

When you have to deal with an office or dept they become a faceless officious nightmare. The appointment “system” is a perfect example of this.

Personally I think the NHS is pretty good. When you get to speak with someone on a face to face basis whether its a doctor or nurse they generally do a good job and treat patient well.

^this, with some proviso’s over big organisation / inflexibility / unable to change.

When you have to deal with an office or dept they become a faceless officious nightmare. The appointment “system” is a perfect example of this.

^this.

Bencooper – Pwah hah hah but I have to 2nd that. Defo the winner and that’s from a regular service user!