Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the number of missed GP appointments in i) Broxtowe ii) Nottinghamshire and iii) England.

Missed appointments, recorded as did not attends (DNAs), are collected through General Practice Appointment Data. Nationally, there were 1.27 million DNAs out of 31 million booked appointments, representing 4.1% of all appointments.

In Nottinghamshire, there were approximately 320,000 DNAs from 8.3 million booked appointments, the equivalent to 3.85% of appointments, which is below the national average. In Broxtowe, there were 21,450 DNAs out of 727,000 booked appointments, representing 3% of appointments, lower than both the Nottinghamshire and national rates.

NHS England currently advises that local National Health Service organisations and general practices make their own arrangements for preventing and dealing with missed appointments. Practices already proactively try to reduce rates of missed appointments by sending text message or email reminders, improving their processes for cancelling or rebooking via their online systems, and by providing flexibility in scheduling, for example by allowing last-minute changes from in-person appointments to remote sessions.