Daily Echo and NHS join forces for Turn Up or Tell 'Em campaign

More than 6,000 GP appointments are being missed each month in Southampton - wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds and depriving thousands of sick and unwell patients opportunities to see a doctor for weeks.

Today, the Daily Echo is joining forces with the NHS to help stop the staggering amount of lost time and money to doctors’ surgeries through missed appointments when health professionals could be helping patients in real need.

We are launching our new Turn Up or Tell ’Em campaign highlighting the impact of how those wasting time and resources leads to extra pressure on hard-pressed doctors, nurses and staff and causes extra frustration for fellow patients desperately trying to secure appointments.

The Daily Echo previously ran a similar campaign after more than 5,000 appointments were missed every month across the region’s major hospitals, to the tune of £6.1 million a year.

But now we are focusing the campaign on GP surgeries in a bid to improve waiting times.

The campaign will also aim to highlight the options available to help patients keep to their appointments and to report cancellations as quickly as possible to ensure the system can run smoothly.

It comes after the Daily Echo exclusively revealed how a total of 6,300 missed appointments were recorded in Southampton in December 2015 alone - costing the the health service £140,000.

The shocking statistics were revealed in a survey carried out by NHS Southampton City Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), which manages the NHS money spent in the city.

On average each appointment costs £23 with varying expenses depending on whether GPs or practice nurses are seen and what treatments are administered.

Nationally, 61,000 appointments are wasted every day by patients not bothering to turn up.

The lost time is equivalent to a year’s work for 1,300 doctors and costs the NHS more than £300 million.

Southampton City CCG chairwoman, Dr Sue Robinson, is one of the first to back our campaign.

She is a GP at the city’s Regents Park Surgery, which is among those bearing the impact of non-attendees, at a time when the NHS is facing the double burden of a funding crisis and a shortage in GPs due to doctors retiring and leaving the service faster than they can recruit.

Dr Robinson said aboutround 6,000 appointments are being missed every month across the city and said: “We understand some people genuinely forget but we’ve had people not turning up because they overslept, were out shopping, or were hungover.”

She said the rising population, and increasing numbers of elderly people needing more regular appointments, has led to an average 40 per cent rise in patients at surgeries with people now typically seeing their doctors aboutaround eight times a year, compared to five times several years ago.

She added: “Most GPs are already exhausted by the end of the day and practice nurses who support us are increasingly stretched and tired.

"We all go into medicine to look after people and it’s heartbreaking to see people waiting longer than they need to for an appointment.

"The public and doctors are all in this together and we have to make this more manageable.

“We are delighted that this campaign to ensure people are using the NHS more responsibly.”

She stressed that a separate appointments are always reserved for patients with emergency conditions, but that people with seemingly “less urgent” health problems will end up waiting much longer, if things continue.

Dr Robinson said she was against the idea of naming, shaming and fining people for missing their appointments - pointing out the administrative costs of pursuing people for fines would be costly.

But she is urging people to register for online access to the GP practice booking system, to allow them to amend appointments at the click of a button.

She added: “We understand that people have busy lives and and we don’t want to impose penalties on people for simple human mistakes.

“But at the same time, we would like to ask the public to do some quick things, such as putting their appointments in a diary, to minimise the chances of forgetting them.

“It’s all about working together rather than having punishments and we are trying to make it easier for people to cancel unwanted appointments.”

"We will be distributing posters to surgeries and health centres, urging people to keep to their appointments or to let GPs know if they cannot make it.

Harry Dymond, chairman of patients group Healthwatch Southampton - which is often criticised for its length of waits for GP appointments - is supporting the campaign and said: “We definitely need to make the public aware of the costs and inconvenience of missed appointments.

“This is a very positive campaign. I was quite horrified at the figures.

"It is staggering - not just the costs - but also that it is depriving people of appointments.”