‘Did Not Attend’ policy and ‘late arrivals’
On average we have 70+ patients per month who fail to show up for their booked appointment with the doctor, nurse, healthcare assistant, phlebotomist. This number is fairly static but is still far too many. Patients who do not attend deprive other patients of obtaining an appointment and makes the waiting time longer. We have made several attempts to address this over the years. We have tried to make it as easy as possible to cancel an appointment with the facility to text back to us when the reminder text is sent. Patients can email the surgery via the website or phone us. Our average waiting time to answer a call is 1 minute 30 seconds. Still the problem persists. So from w/c 9 January 2023 we will begin a new process. Any patient who fails to attend their booked appointment (with any clinician) 3 times in a 12 month period will be deducted from our list and will be required to find a new GP.
We do appreciate that there are valid reasons why patients may not be able to attend but do ask that contact is made to explain the reason why so that we can make a note on the records. If you DO need to cancel an appointment please try and give us enough time to refill the slot. We can usually refill a doctors slot within 1 hour. A nursing slot is more difficult to refill so as much notice as possible would be appreciated. Some nurse appointments are 40 minutes long (for example a diabetic review) so failure to attend wastes an awful lot of time ☹️
IN ADDITION, IF YOU ARE LATE FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT YOU MAY NOT BE SEEN AT ALL. WE ALLOW HALF OF THE APPOINTMENT TIME (5 minutes) LEEWAY. IF YOU ARE OVER 5 MINUTES LATE YOU WILL NEED TO REBOOK THE APPOINTMENT