"Unnecessary appointment confirmation letters"

My story is about my wife’s appointment at the Heavitree – Dermatology clinic. Their specialty is skin analytics.

The reason why I am leaving this story is because I feel there is room for improvement in terms of appointment confirmation and appointment letters. As the current way is, in my opinion, a waste of resources, waste of time and money for the NHS.

My wife was given a phone call on Friday for a telephone appointment to take place on the following Monday. We confirmed our attendance via phone on Friday for the face-to-face appointment taking place on the Monday.

This morning (Monday), the morning of the phone appointment, we just received an appointment letter from the service confirming this appointment after we already had our phone appointment!

This letter was dated the Saturday. Why on earth they are wasting their money on sending this letter, which is very unlikely to be received by the recipient before the time of the appointment? Why waste money when you know very well that the letter is not going to get there in time, especially if an email confirmation would have saved the time and resources spent on this letter.

Most politicians would say it is the post office’s fault and we all know what the post office is like. I am sure that I am not first the person to mention this about appointment confirmation letters. Why risk sending a letter which will not be received in time?

There are absolutely no complaints here about their clinical performance, which has been fine, absolutely good.

Because we gave a definite confirmation of attendance at this appointment via phone, I felt sending the letter was unnecessary. I know that not everyone has an email address to receive email confirmation and reminders about appointments, but this should be looked into in the future as option for service users to opt out from receiving unnecessary letters that do not arrive in time and receive these via email instead.