Extra Outpatient Clinics
The first contact we have with most of our patients is of course through the outpatient department. This is therefore a very important step on the 18 week care pathway.
In 2000 the maximum waiting time was 23 weeks (or 4½ months) which has now been reduced to a maximum of five weeks in the main.
This has meant a lot of extra work in all outpatient clinics with a total of 115 additional clinics carried out between August and November 2007. This has included introducing both evening and weekend clinics, which are proving popular with many patients.
Patients who do not attend
One of the barriers to achieving and maintaining the 18 week target are those patients who do not attend their appointments and who do not let us know that they cannot attend.
Last year some 27,000 appointments were lost because patients did not attend. That is over 11% of all outpatient appointments.
Not only is this a waste of time and money, it also means other patients have had to wait longer because we could not give them these appointments.
In an attempt to reduce this number the Trust has recently introduced a system to enable us to text a reminder to our patients a couple of days before their appointment.