A SIMPLE phone call could help to save Southampton’s hard-pressed doctors £1.68 million a year.

More than 6,000 GP appointments are being missed each month in the city – wasting cash and forcing poorly patients to wait weeks for help. It’s a crisis that’s causing medics and health bosses across the county as surgeries reach breaking point.

But this could end if patients turned up to their appointments or phoned their surgeries to say if they cannot make it or if they no longer need to see a doctor.

That’s why Southampton’s health chief Cllr Dave Shields has backed the Daily Echo’s Turn Up or Tell ‘Em campaign highlighting the impact that missed appointments has on the NHS, wasting resources and adding even more pressure to doctors, nurses and other staff.

It comes after a similar campaign highlighting the effect of the 5,000 appointments that are missed every month at the region’s major hospitals, costing the NHS £6.1 million a year.

The Daily Echo also revealed that 6,300 GP appointments were missed in Southampton in December 2015 alone, costing £140,000.

Now Cllr Shields has told how he is concerned about the crisis at GPs' surgeries. He urges residents to turn up to their appointments, which each cost an average of £23, or tell their surgeries if they cannot make it or no longer need the appointment.

He said: “As the chair of the city’s health and wellbeing board and the city council’s representative on NHS Southampton City CCG, I warmly welcome the Daily Echo’s Turn Up or Tell ‘Em campaign. Southampton’s hard-pressed GP services can ill afford the estimated £1.68 million annual cost of missed GP appointments and everyone needs to accept their responsibility in helping to prevent this money draining away."

“I am also very concerned at the scale of the crisis now engulfing our entire health and social care system – particularly in Southampton. More and more of our GP surgeries are close to breaking point due to pressures on budgets, a shortage of qualified doctors and plummeting morale caused by highly critical and often one-sided national media coverage.

“Through my involvement in the CCG I am working with local GP leaders, patient representatives and others to develop a primary care strategy for Southampton which will provide a first class primary care service for all our citizens.

“This will help make best use of the limited money we have available to us but – without the necessary injection of additional financial resources – we will struggle to provide the kind of high quality service that people need.

Nationally, 61,000 appointments are wasted every day by patients not bothering to turn up.

The lost time is equivalent to a year’s work for 1,300 doctors and costs the NHS more than £300 million.