Every clinic has them. The patient who does not turn up. The slot that goes empty.
How common are missed appointments, really? The honest answer is that it depends on where you look.
A systematic review published in the British Journal of General Practice looked at studies of missed appointments in primary care. Across the 19 studies that reported a rate, the mean was 15.2% and the median was 12.9%.
Those studies come from several countries, and they define “missed” in different ways. Treat the numbers as a range, not a benchmark.
Data from Australian general practice is thinner. One study published in the Australasian Medical Journal in 2014 looked at a large regional general practice super clinic in northern New South Wales over two years, from October 2011 to October 2013. It found that 7.6% of scheduled appointments were missed.
The authors described it as the largest study of non-attendance in an Australian primary care setting, while noting it was not a typical setting. They also noted that data on non-attendance in Australian primary care is limited.
In that clinic, non-attendance was higher on some days: Mondays (8.1%), Fridays (8.0%) and Thursdays (7.9%).
The studies differ in settings, patient groups and definitions. Your clinic’s number, measured your way, tells you more than any average.
Three questions help:
That third question is worth answering before you measure anything. Why How Fast You Follow Up Matters More Than Whether You Do (internal link) and 100% vs. 22%: What an Australian Study Found When Clinics Reached Out First [E3] both look at what reaching out changes.
Patients who missed an appointment are one of the groups a clinic can decide to reach. Coda connects to Best Practice. Your clinic decides which patients to reach, and Coda helps build the flow that identifies them and lets your team contact them in one click.
Curious what that could look like for your practice?
The infrastructure layer that turns GP clinics from passive waiters into active carers.
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