61,000 patients a day miss their GP appointment
MORE than 61,000 GP appointments are being wasted every day by patients not bothering to turn up, research suggests.
The lost time is equivalent to a year’s work for 1,300 doctors and costs the NHS more than £300million annually.
GPs say missed appointments are a ‘plague’ and are becoming more common, driving up waiting times for others.
Many patients simply forget they have made an appointment or find that by the time the day comes round they are no longer unwell.
The latter is happening more and more, as many surgeries are so overbooked they can only offer slots two weeks in advance.
Some campaigners want patients to be fined £20 for not turning up, with repeat offenders struck off surgery lists.
One GP said the problem was made worse when patients who can’t speak English fail to keep appointments after staff have arranged and paid for a translator.
And senior doctors warn the situation is causing huge frustration at a time when surgeries are under growing pressure.
They say a looming GP recruitment crisis has coincided with a steady increase in demand for appointments, brought about by the growing and ageing population. Waiting times at some of the worst-affected surgeries are up to four weeks, while others now demand that patients queue at 7am.
But the latest research suggests tens of thousands of appointments could be freed up every day if patients who were not going to use them phoned up to cancel.
The NHS does not collect data on the number of missed appointments. So to investigate the scale of the problem, the Daily Mail commissioned a survey of 500 family doctors with GP magazine.
On average, they reported that 8.3 appointments were missed per full-time GP each week. But 5 per cent of doctors said 40 slots were wasted a week, including 2 per cent who reported 50 slots or more being lost.
If the average figure is consistent for 36,920 full-time GPs in England then 306,436 appointments are wasted a week, or almost 61,300 a day. This works out as 14.1million a year and means that around one in 16 available appointments are lost.
Roger Goss, co- director of Patient Concern, said: ‘It’s the consequence of having to wait two weeks to see your GP. Patients book up then come the day something else crops up or they no longer feel the need to see the doctor. I wouldn’t object to patients being fined £10 to £20 a time.’
Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association’s GP com- mittee, said: ‘Many practices are struggling to deliver enough appointments to patients who genuinely need them and so when consultations are missed it has a direct knockon effect to people who require care.’
A typical appointment costs the NHS £23, so on this basis more than £320million is being lost each year.
Further analysis of the figures suggests that missed appointments are taking up the equivalent of a year’s work for 1,300 full-time GPs.
Some surgeries already operate ‘ three strikes and you’re out’ policies, whereby patients are removed from the list if they miss several appointments, but this is rare because many doctors are worried about causing disputes.
A spokesman for NHS England said: ‘Not turning up to appointments has a big impact on the care we are able to give others. It wastes doctors’ and nurses’ time, as well as taxpayers’ money.’
Ambulance trusts are failing to meet response time targets for the most serious emergencies, figures for England show.
Only 71.9 per cent of Red 1 incidents – the most urgent – were reached within eight minutes in 2014/15, with six of the 11 trusts missing the 75 per cent target, the Health & Social Care Information Centre reported.
‘Wouldn’t object to people being fined £20’