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Hospital Appointment Reminder Service

Every year a significant amount of patients choose not to attend their hospital appointments. In 2019/20, over 48,852 (7.13%) of people did not attend their appointments across the Health Board. This delays treatment and increases waiting times for all patients.

Text Reminders

This text reminder service helps our patients to remember their appointment details and reduce the number of missed appointments. 

The reminders will include: 

  • Patients' first name
  • Type of appointment e.g. face-to-face, telephone or video appointment
  • Date, time, location and speciality of the appointment (e.g. Respiratory) 

Text reminders allow patients to cancel or amend appointments by sending a text response. This helps to improve clarity and is particularly useful for patients who are attending multiple appointments or if a contact telephone number is used for multiple family members. 

Interactive Voice Message

Our interactive voice message service is a recorded voice message sent to a patient's landline to remind them of their appointment details if a mobile number is not provided on the hospital booking system. The messages give patients instructions to confirm attendance, cancel or rearrange. Calls will come from a local number as follows:

Agent Calls

Our agent phone calls come directly from a member of staff to remind the patient of their appointment details. Patients will NEVER be asked for any payment details during these calls.

Timescale

The hospital appointment reminders are sent to patients seven days and/or forty-eight hours before their appointment. This allows sufficient time to re-allocate outpatient appointments.

Consent to opt-in to the service

To comply with data protection regulations, patients will need to consent to allow us to send personalised messages by completing our online form. 

Patients who opt-in to the enhanced service can choose their preferred language choice, in either Welsh or English to receive the reminders. Patients will continue to receive our basic, bilingual message unless they have opted-out of the service completely. Patients should note that if they decide to 'opt out' they may not receive any form of reminder.  However, patients can change their mind at any time in the future.

To opt-in for the improved text reminder service please complete our online form. Please complete the consent form if your details have changed and you need to update them. 

Further Information 

The total cost of missed appointments in 2021/22 was £7.7m. These missed appointments cost the equivalent of: 

  • 154 hospital beds
  • 173 nurses
  • 744 hip operations
  • 735 knee operations
  • 4,277 cataract operations