Missed appointments cost £20m a month

Missed hospital appointments cost the NHS in London almost £20 million a month.

Fifteen per cent of patients in the capital miss their appointments with specialists compared with a national figure of about 10 per cent.

The figures out today were uncovered by Elizabeth Howlett, Conservative health spokeswoman on the London Assembly.

She said: "These figures will shock every Londoner. The NHS is already severely overstretched. It simply cannot afford to be this inefficient."

She said one cause could be that the time between an appointment being made and the consultation itself was so long that people forgot it. Campaigns to encourage patients to cancel appointments they cannot keep, or if they feel better, have focused on GPs rather than hospital doctors. Some hospitals are now considering sending text messages to patients as reminders.

Ms Howlett said: "With so many appointments being booked weeks in advance, surely the NHS would find it cheaper to remind people of their appointments rather than suffer this level of waste?"

The highest percentage of missed appointments so far this year was at the Homerton University Hospital NHS Trust in Hackney, where 23 per cent of the 53,297 slots booked were missed. A trust spokesman said: "We piloted a textmessaging-service, which had shown good results. However, we put the project on hold while we implemented our electronic patient record system.

"We fully intend to reestablish this service once the new system has bedded in." The trust also hoped to be able to offer patients an appointment within one day of visiting their GP.

"We are confident that this will significantly reduce our missed appointments in the future," he said.

A spokesman for Guy's and St Thomas', where there is also an above-average percentage of missed appointments, said that patient care and the smooth running of the hospitals was affected.

"The trust is putting in place a number of measures to help reduce its rates," he added. The problem has been blamed on patients forgetting when appointments are due because they are so far in the future - or their details change in the interim.

"We know that there are factors that make London different from other regions, like its highly mobile population, which can make it difficult to keep track of people," said Gill Morgan, chief executive of the NHS Confederation.

"London NHS organisations are working hard to make sure that appointments are set for a convenient date and time for patients."

Solutions included the booked admission scheme, where patients agreed their date for admission for inpatient treatment at the outpatient clinic and could also book into clinics via their GP.