Audit on rate of failed appointments

The consequences of patients failing to attend for their appointments include a disruption to their treatment and also a potential loss of revenue to the orthodontists and practice, as the overheads still have to be paid.

An audit including all patients scheduled to attend for an appointment in either practice over two separate fortnight periods, a total of 4561 scheduled visits, showed an overall failure to attend rate of 8.52%. This compares very favourably with other similar studies, which show figures varying from 7% to 22%. Importantly, the failure rate was lower, 6.81%, for patients in active treatment who would potentially suffer most from the delay in being seen again.

We demonstrated an ability to significantly reduce the failure rate further by reminding patients of their appointments but this was very labour intensive and hence expensive. This may become easier when we are able to use automated text and e-mail reminder systems.