ANOTHER surgery has backed the Daily Echo’s campaign to tackle the amount of missed GP appointments.

Aldermoor Surgery is the latest GP practice to back the Turn Up or Tell ‘Em campaign which highlights the huge impact patients failing to notify their doctors or nurses if they are not going to make an appointment has on the NHS.

The Turn Up or Tell ‘Em campaign reveals the cost of how those failing to show up deprives other injured and sick patients the chance to see a doctor or nurse and adds pressure to an already stretched NHS.

Dr Ildar Abdoulline, a GP partner at the surgery, said: “I think the campaign is really good, we need to make people feel responsible for their appointments.

“Missed appointments affect the local population if you don’t need an appointment that is fine, we can give it to somebody else.

“Tell us if you don’t need an appointment, even on the day. If you are due to be seen at 10am and you call at 8am we can give somebody else the appointment.

“There is a huge demand for same day appointments.”

Daily Echo:

As previously reported in the Daily Echo, 6,300 appointments were missed in Southampton in December 2015 which costed the health service £140,000.

The statistics were revealed in a survey carried out by NHS Southampton City Clinical Commissioning Group.

On average each appointment costs £23.

Across the country 61,000 appointments are lost every day by patients not bothering to show up.

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

It comes at a time when the health service is struggling with a funding crisis and a shortage of GPs due to doctors retiring and leaving the service faster than they can recruit.