DNA Policy

The Practice has a significant number of appointment each month which patients do not attend, without contacting the surgery in advance to cancel or rearrange the appointment. The effect of this is:

• An increase in the wait time for all patients to book appointments.
• Frustration for staff and other patients who do attend.
• A waste of time and resources.

The first time a patient fails to attend an appointment, they will receive a courtesy phone call, text or letter to notify them that they did not attend (DNA) their scheduled appointment.

If you fail to attend two pre-booked appointments, you will receive an informal warning letter – reminding you of our practice policy and advising you that missing another appointment puts you at risk of being removed from the Practice list.

Should you fail to attend a third appointment, another formal warning letter will be sent to you. This letter will inform you that if you miss another appointment, you will be removed from the Practice list without further notice.

Unless the Partners feel that there are exceptional circumstances, once you have failed to attend a fourth appointment within a twelve month period, you will be deducted from the Practice List. A letter will be sent to you to inform you of this action.

Phsyio Appointments

The in-house physiotherapy appointments we offer are extremely sought after and we sometimes have long waits for appointments. Unfortuantely, we also have patients who fail to attend these appointments.

Since August 2022 we have had 127 “did not attend” (DNA’s) out of a total of 1603 physio appointments provided by Damian, which is an eye-watering 7.9% of all his appointments. Unfortunately, going forward this means that we have had to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to patients who fail to attend.

Therefore, from 12th June 2023 if a patient does not attend (DNA) a physio appointment without cancelling giving 24 hours notice, they will be immediately discharged from the service and become ineligible for any further in-house physio appointments for 6 months.

Full DNA Policy documents