Failure to Attend Appointments
We understand that it can be frustrating when you are unable to secure an appointment with a clinician as soon as you may like. While demand for appointments is extremely high we work hard to provide an appointment as soon as we can to everyone who needs one. However, this is made more difficult due to the number of wasted appointments that patients have failed to attend.
Wasted appointments that patients have failed to attend costs NHS Scotland £1.4m every day.
At Loch Leven Health Centre the figures are smaller but equally significant as these appointments could have been given to other patients if they had been cancelled.
Wasted Appointments (and running total)
July 2022 – 148
August 2022 – 192 (340)
September 2022 – 187 (527)
Please contact us in advance, even if it is only 1 hour before your appointment time, and we will reuse that appointment to help someone else.
You can contact us in a number of ways:
Telephone us on 01577 862112. If you are unable to wait on the phone you could also:
Email us at: [email protected]
Text CANCEL if you receive an appointment reminder by text message
Click this link on our website to Cancel Appointment
Please help us to make the best possible use of all of our available appointments to help as many of our patients as we can.
E-triage
We recently informed patients that we hoped to implement our e-Triage service in the very near future. We are now pleased to announce that this will go live on Tuesday 25th October 2022. Please find below some further information on this new service.
E-triage will provide an additional way for patients to contact us, tell us about their symptoms exactly as they currently do on the telephone, and allow us to triage them to the appropriate clinician or service. E-triage has safeguarding built in at every stage and also allows patients to attach photographs which can be very helpful to our clinical team in relation to many conditions.
Our aim is that the E-triage service will significantly reduce the number of patients needing to contact us by telephone, reducing telephone waiting time and ensuring those patients who can only contact us by telephone, as well as patients with urgent issues, get through to us more quickly.
A further benefit that we hope is helpful is that the service will be available from 7 – 10.30 am each day and we believe this will be useful for patients who perhaps start work before our telephone lines open, or who are unable to wait in a telephone queue.
Thank you from Dr. Richmond
Dr. Richmond would like to extend his thanks to everyone who took the time to wish him well in the weeks leading up to his retirement. He was very grateful for the kind words, cards and gifts he received.