I have attended an awful lot of outpatients appointments over the last four year, and have had amazingly good experiences to terrible experiences. I have not shown to two of those due to illness, one I was able to give 24 hr notice, the other I was only able to tell them the morning of the appointment. Not much either party can do when you are an inpatient in another hospital.
I like the hospitals with the text alert system. It shows that they are expecting you, that they have your contact details correct and that they give themselves enough time to offer the appointment to someone else if you realise that your appointment was in error or some other reason.
I have had appointments before my scheduled “checkup” and the scheduled appointment was never cancelled, which is frustrating to both sides, especially if it was discussed with the desk clerk. I find most clinics are happy to change appointments if needed, most run on a weekly cycle, and are good to phone or call if things change from their side.
One clinic we attend they cancelled at the last minute their side, a few weeks later a new appointment came and again they cancelled last minute their side. So I phoned to get the new appointment since we could not wait the few weeks to hear. Oh you go to the back of the queue when cancelled I was told. But the cancellations were all on your side. Very well they said but we will have to cancel a newborn baby for you. Pretty grim the mental torture of that. All things being equal what did the age of my girl and a newborn matter, clearly my girl had been waiting months at this stage. If the kid with the clinically greater need was prioritised, the the clerk making the appointments would not be in a position to make that judgement!
I have had many situations where once we arrived at the appointment in the hospital clinic we queue jumped to the front of the queue, from simply the consultant spotting us in the queue as he walked to the clinic and being called in moments later, by-passing many many other people who arrived ahead of us to the trainee doctors being so fascinated with the girls file calling us in early so they can know all about her interesting illness (I very kindly remind these that it is not “interesting” to the girl and please don’t use that phrase around her).
And then I have sat waiting in clinics where they have clearly forgotten us and people who arrived before us and those who arrived an hour after us have all been seen and still we sit there. I have been in a clinic where we drove 3 hours to get there, waited 4 hours and in the 5th hour of waiting were asked if another family could go ahead of us as they were concerned about being late home (the other family, not us). And once I had the consultant step out to check something and never ever come back... his parting words being I will be back in a few minutes.
And sometimes clinics go all pear shaped for the consultant as they deal with emergencies in their own or another hospital. It can very much depend on the speciality. I have had two outpatient appointments the same day with two different specialities in one hospital and the staff worked to make it seamless. One doctor had 8 kids to see in the morning, the other 40. One gave us all the time we needed, the other you need to start asking you questions immediately or he is off to the next patient.
One out patient clinic we attend have a large photo with a picture of the clinic empty and the comment “We were here, where were you.” I laugh whenever I see it, I have never seen the room empty, and on average we wait two hours to be seen, despite everyone having individual appointment times.
I think the news headlines are unhelpful, make the system work better for the patient and the doctor, make it pleasant, give staff and patient time, don’t make people wait weeks and months for the first appointment, look at the workflows and improve them and then measure the don’t shows. Work with the don’t shows individually and understand the reasons they don’t show up, then work on the reasons so other potential don’t shows improve attendance.
