Missed appointments costing Shropshire hospitals £10,000 a day - and that's an improvement

Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust says there are currently more than 33,000 appointments missed every year.

But that figure is an improvement on previous years because of the introduction of a telephone and text reminder service for patients.

Every missed appointment costs between £108 and £160 depending on the speciality. That cost includes the cost of paying for expertise that is not being used as well as infrastructure.

Eight per cent of appointments at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Telford's Princess Royal Hospital used to be missed, but that has dropped to 5.5 per cent, the equivalent of 449 appointments a month.

The trust's says it now contacts more than 8,500 patients every month to remind them to attend appointments.

The annual cost of missed appointments in the county last year was around £3.6 million, but that is an improvement of £582,000 compared to previous years.

Mark Cheetham, medical director for scheduled care at SaTH, said: "The reminders mean more patients are being seen in the clinics and are treated faster. Far fewer valuable slots are being missed since the introduction of the reminder service. Everyone benefits."

The trust uses the Netcall system, which uses a variety of specialist scripts to remind people of the date, time and location of their appointment.

This is used for the majority of appointments booked within the hospital and patients are asked if they will be attending the appointment and if they cannot they are asked if they would like to speak to someone to rearrange it.

When calls are not answered and there is a voicemail available, a message is left giving instructions for patients to call back into the system using a pin number to retrieve their message.

The reminder service is controlled by a call centre based at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.

Mr Cheetham added: "Locating all the booking staff in one call centre was a huge improvement on the previous system and it meant we could keep open for a longer period of time so people can contact us after work or on Saturday mornings.

"This, coupled with the automated call and text reminder service, has been a huge success."