To think that if you cancel on the day with the NHS, you should be put to the bottom of the list?

[SaltAirAndTheRust]

Unless you have a good reason of course!

I’ve just started and I’m in my first week, in this week we’ve had multiple cancel due to nerves or just not turning up. Seeing the amount of work that gets them to this point, it’s staggering! I just can’t get my head around it

'OP you’ll soon learn that the NHS, and admin staff in particular, are despised by Mumsnet on the whole. See above'

It's true. The nastiness on this thread has been really something

Sadly this can happen in certain departments when they are just all booked up. Some departments can have waiting lists over a year long.

And nothing ever goes wrong with that system? Sending is never delayed, names and addresses are never wrong, post is never delayed?

If this happens a lot, as others said speak to the secretaries of that department. They can see when an appointment letter was printed and can then lodge a complaint if they are being printed but not delivered. People can help if they know it’s an issue.

Yep. Very eye opening how horrible some of the comments are.

You are assuming there that everyone has smartphones so can use apps. My 90 year old mother doesn't. She lives alone and relies on letters. Because of her terrible and degenerating eyesight she has to wait for either her carers or my sister or I to be there to decipher them for her.

Very often the letters arrived or were even sent after the appointment should have taken place. There can also be umpteen different letters about the same appointment, issuing it and cancelling/rearranging it dozens of times that interpretation becomes very challenging. I recently went through an avalanche of NHS paperwork for her and ended up none the wiser about what the appointment was, where or when. It was totally incomprehensible. It's utterly ridiculous and we could easily miss an appointment because of it. We simply wouldn't know, and so few of the phone numbers they give in the letters actually seem to work or ever get answered.

The NHS needs to get its own act together. That would certainly help a lot. It might not get away with attempts to fine people until it can prove that it isn't at fault itself.

I suspect you were expecting full validation for your originally cryptic first post and then you felt defensive when people also began pointing out the flaws in the system you are working in. I'm afraid they do exist.

My DH was recently supposed to be seen very urgently by a consultant because he needed to start a certain medication absolutely immediately if it were to be effective. We got told by hospital admin that their waiting list was 14 months long and even if marked as urgent you could be waiting many months. We only managed to solve that because we had been given a direct phone number for the consultant's secretary, so got a message directly to him. He solved the problem, but only by double/triple booking himself on his clinic appointments so that we could be seen within a week, as he wanted.

The whole system is tottering. Sometimes it is patients being twats, but not always.

Department secretaries? They don't have those at my hospital. According to one of my consultants everything is handled by a central pool of admin people.

When I see one of my consultants she is frantically typing the letter as she is talking to me. It is pretty rushed and not very productive. The fact that I am getting worse and struggling is documented, but that is about it.

I have run out of my medication. I can't have any more until the blood results are available. The blood tests for which they didn't give me the form. By the time I got the form there were no phlebotomy appointments available online. You can't speak to anyone, so I logged on every day and eventually got the first available appointment 10 days after I should have had the sample taken. Then we had a bank holiday.

Criticising patients for being flaky is a bit rich IMO.

So what is your takeaway from this? I know from personal experience that admin mistakes are all too common and this problem needs addressing.

Im a nice, understanding, polite person but I might not have been on the occasions when a very stressful situation has been exacerbated by admin errors. Som3 others I’ve seen have let rip at staff for far less than I’ve personally experienced!

It must waste money too.

I’ve tried all afternoon to get through. The phone was never answered and there was no answer machine.

My OH gets no messages/texts/notifications from his oncology department for appointments etc. He gets them for GP appointments and it's hit and miss whether he gets them for x-rays, scans, etc. depending on the dept. The oncology ones don't appear on the NHS app either, nor do oncology dept blood test results etc.

@SaltAirAndTheRust I’ve never had a text or a phone call. I also can’t see appointments or letters on the app.

ive looked.

This comment makes me think you aren't well suited to a job in the NHS. Are you aware of the NHS core values?

Those are presumably the numbers given on the letters (and often on hospital websites too) that frequently go unanswered.

That's incredibly ignorant.

If the system was efficient you might have half a point. But it isn't. Often notification of an appointment isn't received in good time (if it arrives before the appointment at all). It is also ridiculous that so many clinics won't make an appointment for you on the phone at which point you could say whether the given date and time is manageable. Instead they insist on mailing out an appointment and then you're stuck in the first scenario. Only now you could be discharged back to your GP too.

I have at different times been involved with commissioning and the "internal market" in the NHS but I don't know exactly how hospital services are funded and commissioned these days.

I suppose it's possible that the local Clinical Commissioning Group or Integrated Care Board can withold funding if a trust cancels an appointment on the day, but I think they'd have to be serial offenders and that there would be a pretty generous threshhold for cancellations before there were any financial consequences

This is a good point. None of my oncology stuff appears on the NHS app at all. Fortunately I can make the next appointment at the desk when leaving the last one ( luckily on 6 mths check ups now ,) and put it directly into my phone.

I have noticed that letters posted from a BA3 (Bath) postcode take forever to get delivered. This is the NHS central letter hub Yet if get letters from the hospitals, its 2 days.

The NHS app has my minor surgery in 11 days time listed on there. But at the wrong location. The department moved from the main hospital to the first floor of a medical centre about three quarters of a mile away at the beginning of this year. The NHS trust needs to contact the NHS app dept to update their details

I wouldn’t worry. Most of the admin staff in my trust are being coerced into taking voluntary redundancy and the ones that are left are so stressed they are leaving or retiring early.
We’re getting AI systems in now to replace most of us so you’ll only have computers and robots to hurl your vitriol at. All the receptionists are being replaced by digital booking in desks and the consultants are dictating letters transcribed by AI so you won’t have to deal with “incompetent” admin staff for much longer 👍🏻

Do you not get text reminders? We send out appts a month prior, a text 2 weeks before and a phone call reminder a week before, in an effort to reduce missed appointments. Not for our benefit - it's extra work for us- but to try to reduce overall wait times for all

That isn't always feasible though. As a clinician I schedule my specialist clinic as I know how long each patient will take, from between 15 and 60 minutes. Certain activities have to come before others in the schedule for clinical reasons, some need extra staff so these have to be put at times when these extra staff are available, its a logistical nightmare. Patients are asked to note any days they will be away by the referrer before the referral gets to me, but once scheduled, admin cannot easily reschedule it based on patients calling in.

Oh my 🥺.
Well death or a worsening condition may be a result in not showing up.

My friend cannot leave the house without a bottle of vodka because of her nerves - can you imagine the sheer difficulty for her friends and family to manage - and you're just an employee that has to deal with the paperwork - for pay.

For your own sanity, please look for something else ❤️.

At the end of July, I had multiple texts and emails reminding me to be available for a phone call and saying each missed appointment costs £150.

No-one called. When I rang themto query, they rescheduled it to today.

Exactly the same thing happened today...

I recently had to cancel an appointment on the day. It was not at our local hospital but one in the county town.

I had just come out of hospital and there's no way I could have walked to the bus stop without risking collapsing

Is that good enough for you?

I had a letter about missing a therapy appointment with no notice.
I was inpatient at the time, and my therapy sessions were on the same site as the ward I was on, so I could still attend (I was there for 6 weeks). I missed one session because I was restrained, and a letter was sent to my house, that I was not staying in.