Petition Failure to Attend a Healthcare Appointment

Failure to keep an appointment at the GP or Hospital Clinic has significant health economic implications.

This includes:

1] inefficient use of a healthcare professionals time

2] reduced availability of time appropriate appointments for others

3] creation of a backlog of appointments

4] reduced time available for review of patients due to consequential overbooking of clinics in order to accommodate rebooking of missed appointments

5] delay in treatment and monitoring of disease in other patients

6] inefficient use of administrative staff time in preparation for the patients appointment and chasing up of failed attendences.

A structured penalty system should be enforced where it can be demonstrated that a patient wilfully failed to attend an appointment.