Tech And Travel Woes Keep UK Patients From Key Hospital Appointments

Travel difficulties, communication issues and stress are stopping patients across the U.K. from attending their hospital appointments.

Eight million people missed a scheduled appointment over the last year at a cost of around £960 million ($1.25 million) to the country’s public health service, according to patient engagement firm DrDoctor.

The company, who surveyed 5,003 people that missed at least one appointment very the last two years, said patients face numerous barriers to attendance.

Almost everyone surveyed (93%) said they wanted to attend their appointment. But half of respondents said transport was an issue. Some patients were referred to hospitals very far away from home, while others couldn’t afford public transport fares.

More than a quarter of respondents said they worried they’d lose out on work or income, while 17% said religious or cultural commitments got in the way.

Pyschological issues were also a factor in non-attendance, with more than 40% of patients feeling anxious ahead of their appointment.

Women — who were slightly more likely to miss an appointment than men — were also more likely to give stress or anxiety as the reason.

Almost one in five patients said miscommunications about their appointment, like being sent the wrong details or having the time changed, stopped them attending.

Nearly a third of patients (29%) said they’d tried to rearrange an appointment, but couldn’t get through to someone on the phone, while 19% said they found the process of changing an appointment too complicated.

The U.K.’s digital health landscape is fragmented and porous, with different providers using numerous different digital services. Organizations are often at different stages of digitization, and patients can fall through the gaps.

“It’s incredibly frustrating to be told that I didn’t turn up to my appointment, when the appointment system clearly isn’t working,” said 29-year-old Londoner Rachel Donovan, who was removed from a hospital clinic list after an appointment mishap.

“I was recently discharged 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 back and I had no visibility into what was going on.”

More than half of patients (52%) say they know missed appointments are costly for the public health system.

But barriers like transport, communication and anxiety can lead to patients missing multiple appointments, ultimately adding to lengthy national waiting lists. Nearly half (46%) of patients who missed an initial appointment ending up missing more, DoctorDr’s research showed.

The firm, which provides digital and AI-enabled appointments platforms to British hospitals, says making it easier for patients book and change appointments would improve overall attendance.

“Over the past 15 years, many sectors of the economy have been radically reshaped by digital technologies. Yet the NHS is in the foothills of digital transformation,” read a recent report into the state of England’s public health system, the National Health Service.

But although it has faced a decade of “missed opportunities,” a “ tilt towards technology” would boost productivity and help connect hospital and community systems.

Innovations like AI have “enormous potential” to transform care, while “life sciences breakthroughs” can find new treatments.

Government ministers say they want to modernize the country’s health system. Health Secretary Wes Streeting is discussing ways to make care records more accessible accross organisations, as well as how to develop the public health system’s patient-facing app, per CityAM.