Cancelled Clinics at Community Hospitals

At the same time we were receiving comments from other patients telling us that they had been experiencing similar problems, where clinics had been cancelled and they had not been informed.

We set up a series of stands at the hospitals to see if this was an ongoing problem and found that it was. We fedback our intelligence (anonymised) to Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust (SCHT), who are responsible for running these clinics and arranged a meeting to discuss the issue with the Director of Nursing. He assured us that the trust would now be putting a monitoring system in place to track the frequency and spread of the cancellations. He also explained that the trust would look at how they shared this information with their patients and to ensure that patients were given timely, appropriate communications to let them know about any cancellations.

There was an issue with the fact that there was not a receptionist at every hospital and so many patients would sit in the waiting area and not know the clinic had been cancelled. The trust said they would look into rectifying this. We continued to monitor the clinics and ask patients for their feedback. It continued to be a problem so we again went back to the trust and shared our concerns with the Chief Executive and the Patient Experience Lead.

At the current time the issue appears to have been resolved. However, we will continue to monitor this closely and welcome any feedback from members of the public.