Disregarded appointments
Joint press release from the National Academy of Medicine and the National Council of the Physician Chamber
January 27, 2023
The National Academy of Medicine and the National Council of the Physician Chamber wish to express their deep concern about the serious consequences of missed medical appointments.
Several surveys suggest that each week 6 to 10% of patients do not show up at their appointments, which corresponds to a loss of consultation time of nearly 2 hours per week for the physician, regardless of his/her specialty, and, by extrapolation, nearly 27 million missed appointments per year. Moreover, nearly two thirds of these no-shows would concern a first appointment. These figures reflect a regrettable societal evolution.
This phenomenon, which seems to be constantly increasing, has serious repercussions on the supply of care: it seriously disrupts the daily work of private practitioners and hospital consultations, reduces the medical availability of the practitioners affected, limits access to care for patients who really need it, and contributes to increasing the number of patients who turn to emergency services.
If the forgetfulness of an appointment taken a long time in advance or an impossibility of last minute can be exceptionally invoked, the analysis of these no-shows underlines the frequency of appointments taken with two different practitioners according to the convenience of the patient and testifies to a discredit for the medical act considered.
PRESS CONTACT: Virginie Gustin +33 (0)6 62 52 43 42 virginie.gustin@academie-medecine.fr
