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.
Throughout NHS Scotland so far in 2022, there have been 4.5million appointments that patients failed to attend. The cost of this loss to the NHS is £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. We will be publishing monthly statistics going forward but July and August 2022 figures are shown below:
July 2022 – 148 wasted appointments
August 2022 – 192 wasted appointments
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 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 constantly assess and review our services and try to address issues that are identified. One of the areas we are concerned about is the time patients spend waiting on the telephone to speak to our team. To try to improve this we have developed an additional service to ease the pressure and reduce the waiting time.
We will shortly be launching our new E-Triage service via this website. This is for non-urgent matters and those with urgent issues should contact us by telephone.
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. This will reduce the waiting time and will ensure that 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.