Patients missing their appointments cost the NHS £1bn last year

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Don’t know how or why you would dna a gp appt. reason up north you have to ring ring ring ring ring redial redial from 8.00am to book an appointment. Perhaps 10 mins if your lucky later you might get said appointment
 
Is that just your surgery or is every single GP practice up north the same?
 
My surgery other people’s surgeries in a different county. This has been the case for 10 years. When asked about it answer given government tell us to do it. As I always say it’s not national health. It’s postcode health.
 
I am not at all surprised about the no show figures. Have you ever tried to contact your surgery/hospital/clinic to cancel an appt. Multiple choice options don't seem to apply and after being told for the umpteenth time how important my call is and quoting a www. address I can use (which I can't cos you cannot cancel an appt on it) you just give up. 20 minutes is my maximum for staying on hold. Should I charge them for my call?
 
My GP said he didn’t mind if people missed appointments, it meant he got a break to catch up with other stuff or grab a cuppa.
He said the real losers are the patients themselves who can’t get an appointment.
 
The Radio 4 programme More or Less talked about this today. It's available to download (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrss1/episodes/downloads, or at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05tpn4b or http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09l2351).
They talked about outpatient appointments, (if I remember rightly, they also use the word clinics). I take this is mean hospital appointments. They said clinics are over booked, which means "empty" slots are filled.
An appointment costs £120 (nurses time, consumables such as gloves etc). Howevery, they said a missed appointment wouldn't cost £120. That would assume the nurse was stood around doing nothing, other than opening packs and throwing them away (gloves, plasters, bandages etc).
 
As for GPs, at 9:20am (I had several appointments at this time) my old GP would be running 40 minutes late (I'd be waiting till 10am).
 
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