The practice recognises that patients have busy lives forget and can sometimes forget about an appointment until after the event. These patients are usually apologetic, embarrassed, rebook and it doesn’t occur again. However, there are a few patients that will frequently DNA (do not attend), don’t appear to understand or accept the impact it has on other patients. We have tried to follow a policy that tries to change the behaviour of these patient who more frequently miss appointments.
The outcome we are hoping for is to
- Help to reduce the overall number of missed appointments
- Encourage people to cancel appointments if they cannot attend
- Free up wasted appointments
- Help people who frequently miss appointments
- Encourage people to keep the surgery informed of problems
- Find out a solution to the common reasons as to why people miss appointments
- Make allowances for those patients who miss appointments because their lives are in turmoil
Policy
Within any 12 month period:
- 1st Missed appointment - Letter sent informing of missed appointment
- 2nd Missed appointment - Letter sent informing of risk of removal from practice list
- 3rd Missed appointment - Patient's potential removal from practice list
All potential removals will be discussed at our practice meeting - patients may be given a last chance.
- 4th Missed appointment - Patient will be removed
The aim of this policy is to reduce the overall number of missed appointments to put time back into our appointment system that will allow more patients to get appointments at a time that suits them.
The vast majority of patients will never miss an appointment and only some will miss one in their lifetime. There is a small minority however that do miss appointments regularly and we would rather we could change attitudes than put patients off our list - this would always be a last resort.