January 25, 2022 9.17 am This story is over 41 months old

Over 23,000 GP appointments missed in Greater Lincolnshire in one month

Missed appointments waste a lot of time!

GP surgeries across Greater Lincolnshire are feeling the impact of an increased number of missed appointments after suffering 23,549 no-shows in just one month.

The most recent data from the local NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups shows that there were 16,000 missed appointments in November 2021 in Lincolnshire alone. In North East Lincolnshire, there were 3,907 missed appointments in the same month.

In North Lincolnshire, there were 3,642 missed appointments in the same period, which was up by about 600 on the previous month. Dr Satpal Shekhawat, Medical Director of North Lincolnshire CCG, said this comes to nearly 600 hours of clinical work and equates to about 15 full-time GPS.

The total number of missed appointments at GP surgeries for the whole of East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire for November was 38,584. This also includes 7,966 in Hull and 7,069 in East Yorkshire.

Dr Shekhawat told BBC East Yorkshire & Lincolnshire: “It’s a double loss for us. One, we’ve lost that time we could have seen someone else, and that person who wanted an appointment, their problem hasn’t been dealt with so they’re going to contact us again for another appointment.”

Cheryl Gagg, Medical Secretary at Kirton Lindsey and Scotter Surgery, said: “From first thing in the morning we open at eight o’clock, the phone lines ring non-stop, and generally within the first hour you can be booked up. It just wastes a lot of time. There are patients waiting for those appointments that we may have had to turn away for that day, it is incredibly frustrating.”

Patients are being urged to use the NHS app or email so fewer appointments go to waste.