Rishi will introduce £10 fines for missed GP and hospital appointments

[GreenLunchBox]

How will that work, then? If you miss the phone call they'll fine you? Sounds like a license to print money to me 😂

Also so many patients receive letters from hospitals saying they've missed an appointment when they never actually received the letter inviting them for the appointment in the first place. God knows why hospitals still use snail mail. This is completely unworkable.

These two are acting like they're running for student council rather than PM of the country (see Truss wittering on about making Oxbridge interview every student that gets straight As). Tinkering around the edges and stoking culture wars when we're actually heading towards an actual catastrophe this autumn.

Reasons I've missed an appointment: person I was due to see rang and told me not to come (think they forgot to tell admin...), letter arrived after appointment, appointment was rearranged so many times I lost track, no letter arrived at all.

The real kicker is they don't send a DNA letter, so if you didn't know about the appointment, there's no way to know you've DNAd and been discharged.

I refuse to believe that the NHS needs more money.

It needs for doctors to actually listen to patients. To test patients for what they believe to be wrong with their bodies and for everything it could be and for doctors to treat the results or refer to the hospital if a minor operation or treatment is needed. So someone might have to go in for an over night stay and out the next day instead of having to keep going back to the GPs who will only discuss one symptom at a time and test for 1 symptom at a time and waste time until the patient is almost terminal and then having to spend 6 figures on complicated surgery and blocking a hospital bed for several months.

How can you miss what you haven’t been told about. See my other posts

Will it work both ways.

I have had an appointment at my GPs surgery and arrived on time and booked in that I am there with the receptionist.
I have sat there for an hour waiting to be called then when I have asked how long more I have to wait I was told the doctor had gone home

Have you never had any of these things happen to you.

It's an awful system and very unfair culture, where people like you and me might possibly, just about, be able to get back in the system; but the posters' mums described upthread, with alzheimer's disease and confusion and being called on the wrong phone despite relatives repeatedly checking about it, just get dropped through the gaping holes in the safety net and neglected.

And they call them 'DNAs'.

Impossible to enforce and disproportionately expensive to do so. Will they really turn away those with outstanding charges from accessing healthcare? Who would police it?

You mean like the NHS staff member who was annoyed at me missing my appointment despite the fact that the letter with my appointment date and time wasn’t even typed up on 1st May when my appointment was set for, let alone sent out to me for over a month later

I think some nurses and doctors don’t realise that when you “miss” an appointment it might be because you aren’t psychic and nor are you a time traveller.
Not because you got the date and time of the appointment in good time and just didn’t bother turning up.

Dd could supplement her income with the amount of times she has tried to make an appointment with the GPs and they have missed her appointment.
Will they get fined and have to pay the patient

This ^^ is the problem. OTOH, some people do miss appointments deliberately, including my Dad, who recently missed one as he didn’t feel like going and he didn’t bother to ring them ( and you can easily get through to that department). I know he would’ve gone or at least cancelled if he’d been charged £10!

I live in the US now and we’re charged $25 for missed appointments with most doctors and dentists. People such as counselors who don’t use insurance, will charge their full fee for the session, so close to $200.

But, booking appointments is far easier, I receive reminder emails and texts for most appointments. That makes missed appointment charges more understandable, tbh.

The policy is that they get a letter 6 weeks beforehand and the letter ALWAYS has our number on to change or cancel. It is an answerphone as we are not sat by the phone waiting we are with patients, but leave an audible message and we will ring back. Its still not enough for some people, people need to start taking more responsibility.

But what about when you do use the number on the letter and speak to a person or leave a message and you still get noted as DnA. How else am I supposed to do it?? This has happened on 2 or 3 occasions so not a one off!

Well currently yes Im not denying that has happened to you. I am aware that very occasionally patients have been texting a number to cancel their appointments that has nothing to do with us and the message doesn’t get passed on. When we become aware of that we will offer another appointment. But thats the point isnt it? this system of letters is innefficient in many departments around the country so something needs to change doesn’t it?

people change address and don’t tell the hospital. Or theyll tell the GP they’ve changed address but the hospital works on Different IT system so they wouldnt be informed of the change by the GP. We’ve tried sending emails, they get lost in junk mail, problems with encryption, patient doesn’t reply to confirm they’ve received it. you telephone instead but people are at work, or don’t answer their telephones because its a withheld number when the hospital rings, they think its a cold caller. Our admin assistant hasn’t got the time to chase people all day to make sure they’re reading their post.

Im just a nurse who is trying to think of a solution to a problem whereby my time is being wasted on a regular basis meanwhile I know theres a queue of patients who are desperate to see me, its extremely frustrating

Like I said before, is it possible to have the booking system the other way round where you book your preferred slot from whats available with a card deposit? its free but you will be charged if you don’t turn up. If it was possible wouldn’t that work better?

Who will enforce it? Will you not be allowed to book another appointment before you pay the fine? It’ll cost far more to try to chase payments than the cost of the appointment/the £10.

And will I get compensation every time a hospital appointment is cancelled and I have taken a day off work? Or if the GP runs an hour late?

good idea in principle - in practice impossible to enforce

I had a text reminder for an appointment I replied back stating "cancel" to cancel the appointment got a text confirmation then got a DNA letter when challenged it turns out they didn't subscribe to the cancellation service so loads of us were cancelling via text and no-one was telling them....its this kind of disjointed thinking that costs the nhs money that and the time when I rang up the day AFTER my appointment because that was the day I got the letter which was written and posted the day before my appointment

My husband received his appointment letter in the post at 11ish on the day of his appointment- his appointment was at 10am in the morning!😳🤷‍♀️

When I first read the headlines I thought it would be about fining gps for making it so hard to get an appointment.

our surgery is now basically telephone only and you have to wait for a call which could come at anytime in the day. How can one work like that? Before I could take time off work for an appointment.

Like I said before, is it possible to have the booking system the other way round where you book your preferred slot from whats available with a card deposit? its free but you will be charged if you don’t turn up. If it was possible wouldn’t that work better?

@Yorkshiredolls That's how it works in the US, they have a card on file and if you don't show up, it gets charged. This has never actually happened to me, even when I've occasionally had to cancel at short notice due to an ill child or bad traffic jams, they have discretion.

I've had a few of the long waits that PP's have mentioned, the longest being for a routine Ob/gyn appointment...an earlier patient had gone into labour so the doctor was running very late!

Even apart from the issues mentioned above... I work in finance and I don't understand how this money would ever be collected. Who is going to maintain the lists of people who owe £10 and chase them up if they don't pay? Who is going to assess everyone's reasons for not turning up to decide of they amount to a "reasonable excuse"? That all costs money, and it just won't be worth doing all that for as little as £10 a time. So I don't think this will ever actually be implemented. It's a blatant way of shifting blame onto the public for the problems in the system.

Rishi hasn't got a fucking clue about real life or how the NHS actually works on the ground.

He's a twat.

He is a prize twat. Let's make charges for the working class he's not friends with because he has never used the nhs. He's private all the way.

Pure Tory mentality. Let's charge the people who can't afford it for something that has no impact on us of a higher pay bracket. Vile.

People should advise if they can't make it for whatever reason. But there are reasons they can't sometimes like they can't get through or they haven't had their appointment so don't know they'd miss it etc.

Who would police this anyway? Another job for the nhs to absorb and another job in the government to oversee it.

Who would he want in there to oversee this is what we should be asking and what's their salary.

No, he won't. It's idiotic, unenforceable, not thought through. Both of them are just pulling things out of their arses. And Christ on a bike, is first-name calling politicians a thing now, like a real thing? I don't understand this need for chumminess.

Maybe he ought to be looking at making the health tourists pay up first!

How do you know they didn’t have a good reason to miss the appointment. I have got several letters about missed appointments. I wasn’t aware that I even had the appointments I missed in the first place as they never informed me. I also spent a long time cancelling NHS appointments as I went private to try to do the right thing. I was sent more letters about missed appointments- no one had bothered yo mark them as cancelled.

NHS administration is shocking. Sort that out and we could save a fortune.

It's political posturing and unworkable. Will cost more to try and get money back. The reason the NHS is creaking at the seams is not missed appointments - it is a lumbering bureaucracy that does not put prevention and early intervention first and wastes money.

In theory, it wouldn't be so difficult to implement in an increasingly cashless society. A patient makes an appointment and is asked for a card to put on file (nearly everyone uses cards now, not cash). If they simply don't show up without notifying anyone that they can't make it, the card gets charged.

But that's only going to work with an efficient appointments system, when people receive ample notice of appointments and are able to easily cancel or change them. That doesn't currently exist!

Dentist not doctors - but I've been ringing my dentist for days to cancel my upcoming appt that I know we can no longer make. Every day it's the recorded msg "sorry we're too busy to take your call" which I sympathise but why do they not have a voicemail, email or text system? It's infuriating.

The best way to get hold of the them is to write them a letter. That's what we're working with - in 2022.

I had this - I thought I was lost in the midst of an Eagles song gone wrong!

You can cancel any time you like but they don't tell us that
So we take you off our list and you can never get back on it again
Such a lovely place oooh such a lovely place