200 staff hours wasted
as patients fail to turn up
By Lizzie Yates
MORE than 1,000 appointments totalling nearly 200 staff hours have been wasted at Ellesmere Medical Practice in one year by patients who failed to turn up to appointments.
Bosses at the centre on Trimpley Street are now calling for people to cancel any appointments they cannot attend as they try to cut down on the high numbers of missed slots.
Figures released this week show that 809 appointments with nurses and 306 slots with doctors were not attended between March 2006 and February this year, amounting to 184 lost hours.
The highest number of hours were wasted in August last year, a total of 21.3, after 113 nurse and 16 doctor appointments were missed.
Staff at the medical practice, which has 7,200
patients on its books are now taking measures to make it easier for patients to cancel.
Practice manager Ed Manning said: "All our patients when they hear about the missed appointments, find it very annoying."
"There's a hell of a lot of hours that are lost. To have a doctor or nurse twiddling their thumbs when they could be seeing people is not good."
Mr. Manning said that they were looking at having a new telephone system installed at the
centre, and that in the next month or two it would be possible for people to cancel their appointments online.
Problems
He said: "A lot of people have said they've had problems getting through to us so we are trying to make it easier."
"Everybody who does not attend will get a letter from us. We are considering getting people to fill out a survey, so we can find out more why people haven't turned out. It should be quite useful."
"There's a wide range of reasons why people don't turn up."
"The main thing is if they can call us if they can't come because somebody else could have it."
Mr. Manning added that nurse appointments could be made up of multiples of 10 minutes, meaning that it was possible for one person to miss three appointments in one go.
Reproduced from the North Shropshire
Chronicle 19/04/2007
