How does the NHS tackle eight million missed appointments?

One of the perennial scapegoats of the NHS is the patient who doesn’t turn up for their GP appointment. The headlines write themselves: millions of pounds wasted and other patients can’t get seen. But while missed GP visits have become a symbol of inefficiency, a far bigger – and often overlooked – problem lies within our hospitals.

Every day, there are more than 300,000 outpatient appointments at hospitals, from MRI and breast scans to plaster casts and blood tests. And every day, 20,000 patients don’t turn up.

On the surface the data looks like a success story for the NHS, with the percentage of appointments that patients miss gently falling over the last decade.

Unfortunately, like most of our health service, the figures are running to stand still and not even achieving that.