Booked at seven in the morning

The practice opened on Saturdays for a year, and the people who had been missing appointments carried on missing them.

Prevention work is invisible when it succeeds, which makes it the first thing cut and the last thing measured.

The third appointment

Ten minutes is not enough and everyone in the building knows it. The question the practice asked was what ten minutes is actually best spent on.

We added capacity where it was easy to add, not where it was needed. That took us a year to notice.

Dr. Priya Ramanathan, general practice

The referral that worked

The change was administrative rather than clinical. Certain patients were flagged to a named clinician, and the booking system stopped offering them anyone else.

Early slots, booked the same week, cut non-attendance by more than half among the group that had been hardest to reach.