NHS Turns To SMS for Appointment Reminders


Hull and East Yorkshire Woman and Children's Hospital have revealed the results of a pilot using SMS for patient appointment reminders. The reminder service helps reduce missed patient appointments and the resulting losses in hospital revenues estimated at £614 million a year due to patient no-shows.

The service sends out a text message reminder to all patients or customers nominated mobile phones at an agreed date ahead of the forthcoming appointment. On receipt of their reminder, patients or customers have the opportunity to reply, should they be unable to attend their appointment.

Hull and East Yorkshire Woman and Children's Hospital’s Paediatric Outpatients Unit provides specialist and general care to children, around 15,000 outpatient appointments are scheduled by the unit each year. Over 20% of these are missed, however, because patients simply forget to attend.

“Clearly missed outpatient appointments are a prime concern to the unit for a number of reasons, the most important being the health and well-being of the child,” says Paediatric Services Manager. “A further concern is the financial impact of missed appointments as Primary Care Trusts do not fund missed appointments. This represents a significant loss to the potential income to the Trust.”

Reminding patients of appointments via the messaging service is playing a valuable part in reducing the number of missed appointments at the unit. “During the last three months, we’ve experienced a noticeable drop in the number of patients who haven’t attended appointments," says the Services Manager. “In some cases, it’s unavoidable that an appointment will be missed, but because we provide an option to reply within the reminder we send, patients can let us know if they’re not able to attend and in many cases we can allocate their slot to another patient.”

Of a sample of patients who were asked whether or not they would be happy to receive this type of reminder, over 90% said they would like to. Since the Trust started to use the mobile application, its bank of patient mobile numbers has grown from below 3% to around 30%.

To read more about how SMS appointment reminders are being used by other customers
you could visit our Borders and Immigration case study by clicking here.

Alternatively visit our Premier Inn case study to read how they have implemented SMS
appointment/booking confirmations by clicking here.

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