Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to decrease the number of people missing or cancelling ophthalmology appointments.

Local National Health Service organisations are responsible for making their own arrangements for minimising the number of people missing or cancelling ophthalmology appointments.

The Department, in conjunction with behavioural scientists at Imperial College, conducted randomised controlled trials at Barts Hospitals NHS Trust looking at the content of the most effective text message reminder. The results were published in an online academic journal in September 2015¹ and summarised on the Department’s website in January 2016².

¹ http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137306

² https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reducing-missed-hospital-appointments-using-text-messages