Hospitals managing Choose and Book referrals are giving patients non-existent appointments in a peculiar attempt to help meet waiting time targets, Pulse has learned.
South Devon Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust is the latest trust to start using the system – the patient is given an initial appointment while at the GP practice, however, he/she is told not to attend it. The hospital then contacts the patient at a later date to arrange the real appointment.
A Trust spokesperson maintained that the scheme would allow consultants to review referral details at an early stage and ‘speed patient access to diagnosis and treatment’. The spokesperson said “When a GP refers a patient to gastroenterology for medical review, their referral is starting the clock ticking for the patient’s waiting time and enabling the hospital to immediately access the referral.”
However, according to Pulse, a dummy appointment trial was scrapped last year in Lancashire after it was found too many patients were baffled by the whole thing. According to Dr. Terry Oçonnor, PEC chair for NHS Central Lancashire, the use of dummy appointments was ‘not acceptable’ after it was found that a patient actually turned up for a dummy appointment in the early hours of the morning.
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals said the use of ‘dummy clinics’ had been abandoned after a technical issue had been resolved.
Dr Charlie Daniels, chair of Devon LMC, said “It is quite embarrassing,’ he said. ‘The idea that’s been sold to the patient is they can come in and make an appointment in their doctor’s surgery when in fact the system doesn’t allow you to do that.”
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Source – John Robinson
Pulse.