To cancel or change your appointment, please call the relevant number below so that your appointment can be re-arranged and your appointment slot offered to another patient.   

Call us directly –

Available between 8.00am and 5.00pm Monday to Friday

Please note if you have missed your appointment without giving us prior notice you may be removed from the waiting list altogether, in which case you will need to ask your GP to re-refer you back to the hospital. 

For more information on the North East ‘Keep it or cancel it, don’t waste it’ campaign visit NHS North East

KEEP IT
OR CANCEL IT
DON’T WASTE IT  

Over the past year more than 50,000 patients failed to attend their outpatient appointment at City Hospitals Sunderland without giving any prior notice whatsoever.  This is a significant waste of resources, which not only has a considerable negative impact upon the Trust financially but it can also affect how quickly we can see and treat people.  We obviously want to investigate ways of minimising the impact this has as much as possible, and ultimately provide a better service to our patients by utilising our doctors’ and nurses’ time more effectively.

It has been proven that whilst there are many factors that contribute towards outpatient DNAs, the most common reasons are:

•   Patients forgetting about their appointment 
•   Clerical errors or communication failures which mean that the patient was unaware of the appointment  

We are hoping to address both of these issues by piloting an outpatient reminder service within a few key areas that are most heavily affected by patients that do not attend their appointment.  We are therefore delighted to announce that the pilot was launched on the 23^rd June, within the Medical specialties of:  

• Endocrinology
• Gastroenterology
• Nephrology
• Thoracic Medicine

So, how are we sending out the reminders to patients?  We have chosen telephone ‘reminder’ calls, which will be made around one week before the appointment is due to take place.  The calls are made using both automated calls and calls made by call centre staff.  The service is being provided by a company called 360CRM, who are well established in this field and are widely used by other NHS organisations.

During the ‘reminder’ calls, once the patient has been successfully identified, a few basic details about the appointment will be stated and then the patient will be asked to confirm whether they are going to attend or not.  If the patient cannot attend their appointment, they will be given the opportunity to let us know whether they want to cancel the appointment altogether or rearrange it for another time.  This information is fedback to our Outpatients Department, which then gives us the opportunity to re-allocate empty slots to other patients.  

This service should significantly improve the Trust’s outpatient Did Not Attend (DNA) rates, which is a measure of how many patients DNA as a proportion of all of our outpatient activity.  This improvement will reduce costs, allow us to book and run our clinics more effectively and increase productivity.  If the pilot proves to be successful we will be looking to roll the service out to all relevant specialties as well as investigating alternative methods of communication such as text and email reminders.