Buses, vans and trucks are pictured on a road in Glasgow, Scotland.
Travel difficulties, communication problems and stress are preventing patients across Britain from attending their hospital appointments.
According to patient engagement firm DrDoctor, eight million people missed a scheduled appointment in the past year, costing the country’s public health agency around £960 million ($1.25 million).
The company, which surveyed 5,003 people who had missed at least one appointment in the past two years, said patients face numerous barriers to attendance.
Nearly all respondents (93%) said they wanted to come to their appointment. Only half of respondents said transportation was a problem. Some patients were referred to hospitals far away from home, while others could not afford public transport costs.
More than a quarter of respondents said they were concerned about losing out on work or income, while 17% said religious or cultural obligations were getting in the way.
Psychological issues also played a role in no-shows, with more than 40% of patients feeling anxious about their appointment.
Women – who missed an appointment slightly more often than men – also more often cited stress or anxiety as the reason.
Nearly one in five patients said miscommunication about their appointment, such as receiving the wrong details or changing the time, prevented them from attending.
Nearly a third of patients (29%) said they had tried to reschedule an appointment but could not reach anyone on the phone, while 19% said they found the process of changing an appointment too complicated.
The digital healthcare landscape in Britain is fragmented and porous, with different providers using numerous different digital services. Organizations are often at different stages of digitalization and patients can fall between these gaps.
“It’s incredibly frustrating to be told I haven’t turned up for my appointment when the appointment system is clearly not working,” says 29-year-old Londoner Rachel Donovan, who was removed from a hospital clinic list after an appointment mishap. .
“I was recently fired for missing an appointment that I didn’t even know was happening after my results appointment was scheduled before my actual scan,” she said in an emailed statement. “I chased twice, but I never heard anything and I had no idea what was going on.”
More than half of patients (52%) say they know that missed appointments are costly to public health.
But barriers such as transportation, communication and fear can cause patients to miss multiple appointments, ultimately contributing to long national waiting lists. Nearly half (46%) of patients who missed a first appointment ended up missing more, DoctorDr’s research found.
The company, which provides digital and AI-enabled appointment platforms to UK hospitals, says making it easier for patients to book and change appointments would improve overall attendance.
“Over the past fifteen years, many sectors of the economy have been radically transformed by digital technologies. Yet the NHS is at the foothills of digital transformation,” said one recent report in the English public health system, the National Health Service.
But even as the country has suffered a decade of “missed opportunities,” a “lean toward technology” would increase productivity and help connect hospital and community systems.
Innovations such as AI have “huge potential” to transform healthcare, while “breakthroughs in life sciences” could deliver new treatments.
Ministers say they want to modernize the country’s healthcare system. Health Minister Wes Streeting discusses ways to make healthcare records more accessible within organizations, as well as how to develop the public health system’s patient-facing app. per CityAM.