Are hospitals to blame for lost appointments?

IT’S true that sometimes letters for hospital appointments don’t arrive at the patient’s address (Mail). This happened to me earlier this year, when I should have seen the surgeon after an operation. The first I heard about it was when a letter arrived giving me another appointment ‘as I hadn’t attended the previous one’. Did the hospital believe me when I said I’d never received the original letter? The solution, if one has a mobile phone, is to give the number to both hospital and GP and then they can send reminders by text. This seems much more reliable. DELPHINE ISAAMAN, Marlborough, Wilts. i WONDER if it’s always the fault of the patient when people fail to attend NHS appointments (Letters). in the nineties, i regularly had to attend London hospitals for tests for poisoning by agricultural pesticides. travelling by train from the isle of Wight for early appointments was costly. i always asked for meeting later in the day. the senior consultant, however, arranged my appointments in the same clinic, to see him first at 9.30am. Arriving at this time doubled the cost of my train fares, which weren’t recoverable. i arrived each time and waited, but neither the consultant nor his registrar kept the appointments. At one point, i saw notes claiming i hadn’t attended appointments — on dates that were never communicated to me. Hospitals also sometimes fail to keep appointments for operations. patients travel, often early in the morning, and may even be prepared for operations, but have them cancelled at the last minute. this is quite common. presumably, the staff are still paid, but the costs to the patient and NHS can be enormous. the waste isn’t always the fault of the patient. RICHARD BRUCE, Yarmouth, IOW. WHEN we’re given an appointment at Derriford Hospital, in Plymouth, we receive an appointment confirmation/refusal telephone call a week before the date of the appointment. It’s appreciated by the majority of patients, but there are still some patients who don’t turn up. J. and M. SPRINGETT, Plymouth.