NO-SHOW PATIENTS WASTING MILLIONS

MISSED APPOINTMENTS IN COVENTRY HAVE ALREADY COST NHS £2.5m THIS YEAR

PEOPLE often moan about how difficult it is to get a hospital appointment - but patients not turning up for them are costing the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds.

“No shows” in Coventry and Rugby this year alone have cost the NHS more than £2.5 million.

Between January and June, a whopping 22,077 people either completely failed to turn up for a consultant outpatient appointment - having given no prior warning or turned up too late to be seen.

That works out as 122 every day, on average.

Each outpatient appointment costs the NHS an estimated £120.

That means the total value of missed appointments commissioned by Coventry and Rugby CCG stands at around £2.65million for the first six months of 2018.

A total of 215,966 people did show up for an outpatient appointment during the same period.

That means patients failed to turn up 9.3 per cent of the time.

Put another way, roughly one patient in 11 in Coventry and Rugby is failing to turn up for their outpatient appointment, and failing to call ahead to let the relevant hospital know.

Across England as a whole, 2.9 million people were “no shows” at consultant outpatient appointments in January to June this year.

That has cost the NHS an estimated £346 million.

The overall “no-show” rate is 8.6 per cent, or roughly one patient in 12.

London dominates the list of places with the worst records. Lewisham and City & Hackney have the highest “no-show” rates of all, at 14.7 per cent apiece.

That means roughly one in seven patients simply do not show up.

Tower Hamlets, Islington, Camden, Southwark, Lambeth, Brent, Barking & Dagenham, Newham and Greenwich come next. Manchester has the worst record outside London, with one in eight patients (13.2 per cent) failing to turn up for their appointment.

Wakefield in Yorkshire has the most reliable patients.

The “no-show” rate there was just 3.6 per cent between January and June.

The figures come from hospital monitoring data published by NHS Digital.