Councillors concerned about high rate of missed appointments for residents living near Scarborough Hospital
Residents in deprived areas of Scarborough living within three miles of the hospital have the highest rate of missed appointments.
Councillors have expressed shock and concern at NHS data which revealed that residents living in deprived coastal areas, within three miles of Scarborough Hospital, were the most likely to not attend appointments.
Simon Morritt, chief executive of the York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, told a recent meeting of the Scarborough and Whitby Area Committee that “we may need to think differently about how we communicate with those families because text messages may not be enough and there may be other mechanisms for us to use”.
Coun Liz Colling said: “Obviously the NHS Trust is concerned about a clinic that is booked up but only five people attend.
“I’m concerned if someone in my area goes to the bother of visiting a GP and getting a referral to the hospital to see a specialist and just doesn’t attend.
“If we don’t understand why it is that they have an unmet health need that isn’t going to go away, then they are going to reappear at a later date when their situation has deteriorated.”
The chair of the committee added: “There’s a public health issue and the other is around public transport and for us councillors, understanding the reasons why people don’t attend and matching that to what laughable infrastructure we have around some public transport, would make it really useful.”
Councillors agreed that they would hold a special seminar with health bosses to better understand the reasons behind the ‘do not attend’ (DNA) rates.
Gary Hardcastle, the trust’s head of business intelligence and insight, said that the average rate of patients not attending appointments across its sites was around five per cent and that nationally the trust was doing well.
He also noted that attendance rates improved after the implementation of text message reminders for patients ahead of appointments.
Mr Hardcastle told the committee: “It was nice to see that when text message reminders were implemented there was a real shift in our proportion of non-attendance moving from seven per cent to below five per cent and we have actually maintained that lower percentage.”
However, he said that the most deprived coastal areas had a 6.6 per cent DNA rate for in-person appointments at Scarborough Hospital:
He added: “The majority of the people in the most deprived areas actually live within three miles of Scarborough Hospital.”
The data focused on East Coast residents with face-to-face appointments at Scarborough Hospital.
The date for the seminar between health bosses and councillors has not been publicly announced.