Thank you to everyone who has responded to my column so far. I have been very pleased with the response from the local community.
Included in the questions I have answered this month were questions relating to bus services, the A&E service within the locality and staff to patient ratios.
This month I would like to talk about the Outpatients’ Department.
Just to give you a flavour of the amount of patients we see, in our first year, we saw 59,239 patients and in our last complete financial year we saw 73,701. Within this year we expect that to increase further.
To achieve this we have worked with our partner organisations to bring different outpatient services to the hospital and have increased the amount of activity within the department by effective use of the clinical areas.
Clinics which have been added since we moved to the new site include minor procedures, sleep apnoea, colorectal, oncology, ante natal and ultrasound scanning for various specialisms including ante natal and vascular clinics. There has also been an increase in existing clinics in many areas including general surgery, orthopaedics, ophthalmology and diabetes.
As well as all this, we are currently looking into further opportunities and have some clinics in the process of being finalised.
One of the issues that we still face is the Did Not Attend (DNA) rates we experience.
In the first year of opening our DNA rate was five per cent. It might not sound much but that rose to six per cent – or 4,637 appointments – not kept last year.
As a rough estimate, the cost of a missed appointment with a consultant costs around £100. This figure includes the nursing and administrative input, as well as the cost of any consumables or facilities costs incurred. This amounts to over £463,000 during the last year.
My advice and request to those who do not wish to keep their appointment is to refer back to their appointment letter for contact details of who to phone should the appointment no longer be needed.
One addition that I would like to mention is even though the amount of parking available at the Johnson is far more than was available at the old sites combined, due to the amount of clinics we run, our free parking can often be full to capacity.
I would like to remind visitors that due to the nature of the majority of activity within the hospital being appointment attendances, the movement of vehicles is constant. Therefore those who would like to park are advised to arrive about 20 minutes early for their appointment to be able to park.