Appointment, please, but not on Tuesday

Patient 'no-shows' a waste, say doctors

Thousands of operations and specialist appointments are cancelled every year because patients fail to show up, district health board figures show.
Senior doctors say patients who cancel on the day or simply fail to arrive are a huge drain on the cash-short public system.
But they have stopped short of calling for fines or sending errant patients to the back of waiting lists, which would add expensive layers of bureaucracy and put lives at risk.
Instead, health boards are looking at innovative ways of ensuring patients turn up, such as allowing them to book their own appointments. more here

Well duh!

It is more than time district health boards looked at this from the patients perspective.

The reality for the patient is they have be referred. They don't know when or even if they will get an appointment. It could be next week, it could be next year despite the rhetoric of waiting lists being capped at 4 months.

When the appointment finally arrives the patient is expected drop everything to attend, regardless of the amount of notice given. Sometimes this is only days. My friend, WOF guy, even had a call from the hospital asking why he hadn't confirm he would be at the booked appointment when he hadn't yet received the letter informing him of it. The letter finally arrived the day before the appointment time.

When middle child received her last specialist appointment, not only did she have to miss one of her rare, much enjoyed school swimming lessons (quite a disruption even for a high functioning Autistic) but my secretary had to arrange cover for the volunteer job she was booked to do that day to take her. Any other day of the week would have been more convenient. Even better would have been a date and time nearly 12 months earlier when the specialist check was due.

Reality is that patients have lives and it is unrealistic to expect people to drop everything just because they are waiting for an appointment from the public health system.