120 a day fail to turn up for hospital appointments

Date Published: 09-May-2013

BY DARA BRADLEY

There were more than 7,800 ‘no show’ patients, who did not turn up for outpatient appointments at University Hospital Galway in the first quarter of this year.

The latest figures suggest that by year-end the numbers of patients who don’t turn up for appointments in 2013 at the city hospital will top 31,000.

The figures are astonishing given that the numbers on the outpatients’ waiting list would fill Pearse Stadium and that some are on the list for more than a year.

Official Health Service Executive (HSE) West figures show that the numbers of patient DNAs (Did Not Attends) at UHG stood at 7,855 between January and March of 2013.

That equates to a rough estimate of 120 patients failing to turn up for outpatients’ appointments every day in January, February and March excluding weekends.

The figure is worrying because the ‘no shows’ effectively mean those times are ‘lost slots’. The medical teams will have readied themselves for the appointments, and pulled the patients’ charts but on 7,855 occasions in just three months, the patient didn’t turn up.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.