Express & Star comment: No-shows letting the NHS down
Picture the scene. One of those television audiences – Question Time, for example.
Hands up, says the host, all those who would be prepared to pay a little bit extra in tax to support the National Health Service.
Typically, everybody, or at least the vast majority, will put up their hands.
But here is another question without political overtones, rooted in the real-life operation of the NHS and how ordinary members of the public are helping the service do its work smoothly and efficiently.
And that question is: How many of you are keeping your doctors’ appointments?
Maybe there would be another forest of hands going up for that one, but some of them would be going up rather uncertainly, as the bald statistics show that large numbers of people letting the NHS down.
They are booking appointments and then not turning up. Fine, these things can happen unavoidably or through unforeseen circumstances. And if you ring in to say you can’t make it, then so long as you give a reasonable amount of notice then somebody else can be slotted in, with no real harm done
Yet a tidal wave of missed appointments across the region is costing the NHS a lot of money.
According to information from NHS Digital, in Wolverhampton in December, for instance, one in every 12 appointment with a doctor or nurse was missed without patients calling in to cancel or rearrange them. The cost of that is put at knocking on £220,000. Extrapolate that to a full year and the loss is in millions just in one relatively small geographical area.
In Shropshire during the same month there were one in 22 no-shows without explanation – a comparatively impressive measure of consideration for the NHS from Salopians – while in the separate Telford patch it was one in 15 no-shows.
Nobody will be doing that motivated by a desire to do the NHS a bad turn. They may simply forget to ring in, or assume that some other patient will seamlessly take their place, or may even think they are doing the medical professionals a favour by lessening their workload. You could tackle the problem with fines for missed appointments. Far better though to get the message across: if you can’t make it, let them know.
