General Practitioners and Hospitals: Attendance

(asked on 2nd September 2016) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will estimate the cost of missed GP and hospital appointments in (a) England and (b) each clinical commissioning group in each year since 2010.


Answered by
Philip Dunne Portrait
Philip Dunne
This question was answered on 12th September 2016

Information on the number and cost of missed general practice appointments in England is not held centrally.

Information on the number of first and subsequent consultant-led hospital outpatient appointments that the patient did not attend is shown in the following table for England and in the attached table for National Health Service commissioning organisations.

Table: Number of first and subsequent consultant-led hospital outpatient appointments that the patient did not attend, England, 2010-11 to 2015-16

Year

Number of did not attends (millions)

2010-11

5.7

2011-12

5.5

2012-13

5.5

2013-14

5.5

2014-15

5.7

2015-16

5.8

Source: NHS England, quarterly activity return, published on the NHS England website at http://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/hospital-activity/quarterly-hospital-activity/

Information on the cost of missed hospital appointments is not collected centrally. However, the most recently published data from the Department’s annual collection of reference costs from NHS trusts and foundation trusts estimated the national average unit cost of a consultant-led outpatient attendance at £132 in 2014-15. Multiplying the number of missed appointments by this figure would give an upper estimate of their costs, because NHS organisations can and do plan for an anticipated level of missed appointments.

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