With the current COVID surge in the UK, it seems there are a lot of last-minute cancellations going around. And whilst that’s unavoidable right now, I’m hearing from a lot of colleagues that non-COVID cancellations are also on the rise. In particular, people not showing up and not bothering to let you know.

A member of my Advanced Communications Course asked about how to deal with this recently. I’ve tried a number of different approaches over the years and found a huge variation in effectiveness.

Many of the common approaches out there seem sensible, but in fact either make the problem worse or result in lots of angry complaints.

I thought I’d share my thoughts on this with you, along with how our current approach has resulted in a much happier clinic team – but more importantly, happier patients!