On Missed Appointments: The Ethics of Nonattendance in General Practice

A substantial number of general practice appointments in England are missed each year, which incurs considerable cost to the NHS. In the absence of an authoritative policy, there is variation in how GPs manage missed appointments in this setting. There are various reasons for why patients miss their GP appointments, many of which lie outside the patients' control.

This paper undertakes an ethical analysis, using the framework of Principlism, of missed GP appointments in the NHS.

This paper finds that missed appointments might prevent the patient's autonomy (which requires the health problem for which the GP appointment was booked to be adequately addressed) from being upheld, frustrate the possibility of promoting beneficence (particularly among patients with multimorbidity and mental health problems), threaten non-maleficence (also particularly among patients with multimorbidity and mental health problems), and violate the principle of justice due to exacerbating health inequalities and wasted scarce healthcare resources.

This paper suggests that GPs should make efforts to contact patients who miss their appointments, via telephone in cases of missed in-person appointments, and via multiple attempted calls in cases of missed telephone or online appointments.