At Midland Physiotherapy, we aim to provide all patients with the best possible service. When patients book an appointment, they are reserving a clinician’s time. Missed appointments are a lost opportunity to provide valuable patient-facing time to another patient in need.

We recognise the efforts our patients make to attend appointments on time and appreciate that emergencies happen and occasionally patients run late. Therefore, this policy helps us to deliver private physiotherapy services fairly, consistently, and appropriately to ensure a transparent process is followed when a patient attends an appointment, attends an appointment late, misses an appointment or cancels at short notice.

Please consider the impact that failure to attend or tardiness in attending appointments has on clinicians and other patients.

Attendance

It is recommended that patients arrive appropriately dressed at least 5-10 minutes before the allotted appointment time. Any time wasted in waiting for a patient’s readiness will form part of the allotted treatment time without extension of time.

Patients are kindly requested to vacate the treatment room after their allotted appointment time to allow us to prepare for the next appointment.

Lateness

When a patient arrives less than ten (10) minutes late, the receptionist will mark the patient as “Arrived” but advise them that they may have an extended wait as the clinician may be with another patient listed for treatment. In this situation, the patient may choose one of the following options:

• Wait until there is a suitable gap in the clinician’s diary to be seen (clinician’s discretion)
• Reschedule their appointment

A patient that arrives more than ten (10) minutes late have missed their appointment and will need to reschedule with the full appointment fee still payable. This is to prevent delays and ensure fairness for patients that have arrived on time.

Cancellation or Rescheduling

We operate a 24-hour cancellation and rescheduling policy in which case there will be no cancellation fee charged or otherwise the full appointment fee will be payable.

Notice of cancellation or rescheduling must be via email or telephone discussion with us and not by leaving a message on our answer phone.

More information on our Cancellation Policy can be found HERE.

Further Information

Late patients may be seen at the discretion of the clinician. If the clinician agrees to see a patient that has arrived late, the patient will need to wait for an appropriate gap in listed appointments to be seen.

If a patient calls ahead to inform us that they will be late and there is no patient listed for treatment after their appointment was scheduled to end, we may still agree to see them.

Reception staff are not permitted to interrupt clinicians during appointments to request them to see late patients, so to avoid disappointment, please do not ask them to do so.

Failure to Attend (FTA): This is logged by our system when no notice has been given either verbally or in writing and means we cannot offer the appointment to another patient.

Short Notice Cancellations (SNC): A short notice cancellation (less than 24 hours’ notice) is the same as a missed appointment as we are unable to offer this to another patient resulting in clinical time being wasted and its negative impact on patient care.

We reserve the right to refuse to rebook persistently late patients or regularly reschedule appointments and discharge them from our care. For patients covering the cost of their treatment by an employer occupational health scheme or private health insurance (personal or corporate policy), we are contractually obligated to inform them of this. See our terms and conditions for more information.

Thank you for your co-operation in making our policy work.