Hello
@gennepher No shows are a huge problem for our NHS. I wonder if it is time for cash registers at health centres. Problem is, would you really charge adults who miss, for example, malaria or MMR jabs? Would that raise or reduce "herd cover"?
I don’t know what the answer is, because the no shows for the eye treatment, say, could possibly be costly for the NHS to correct/treat any resulting problems from that. So, do the NHS refuse to treat them because of that?
Two hospitals I go to, say that if you don’t turn up for your appointment then they will not see you again and you are referred back to your GP. (What your GP does with you at that point, I don’t know)
My eye laser treatment appointment letter said that if I didn’t turn up for the treatment appointment, then they wouldn’t treat me, sign me off their books, and I would be referred back to GP.
I have a Cochlear Implant with external speech processor etc, and my appointment letters for that, say if I do not turn up for an appointment they will discharge you. So you could end up with useless wires in your cochlear, and a processor that has broken down. Would you take that risk? I wouldn’t.
My car engine literally blew up in smoke on the expressway to the hospital for one of my appointments. My first thought was not for the RAC, I didn’t give a whatsit for the car. My first thought was to ask a stranger to telephone the hospital and explain my car had just blown up and I was stranded and unable to get to my Cochlear appointment. Because in my mind all I could think was it sounded like an unlikely excuse. But me and my Hearing Dog for the Deaf were stranded on the embankment, with a smoking car. I have never bought a Fiat again...
I do know of a patient at the same hospital who didn’t turn up, and in addition his dog repeatedly chewed up his cochlear processor, a very expensive piece of equipment. So the hospital wouldn’t replace it any more, so he had these useless wires in his head and obviously cannot hear without the processor. Finally they gave him a very old basic processor, one of the first, but he has no remote and no way of controlling it. He came to one of our Cochlear meetings. I could see the hospital staff bristling, before he even spoke to me. And when he told me the above story, especially treating it as a joke that his dog kept chewing it, I was the wrong person for him to tell that. I gave him short shrift, and that is the polite version. He left and never came back.
>^..^<