As you may be aware, our hospitals are as busy as ever, dealing with urgent cases as well as prioritising cancer care and urgent treatments. We urge all patients waiting hospital appointments to be patient and wait to be contacted.
If your appointment is delayed and you desperately need an update, please ring the secretary of the hospital consultant or department that you are under for this information.
You can find out about the waiting times of secondary care providers by entering the details on My Planned Care
Written requests to expedite appointments
Please be aware that simply waiting a longer time than you may have done pre-pandemic or longer than you would like does not make your request urgent. Everyone is waiting longer*, therefore we cannot write letters to expedite your appointment for this reason. If your condition is deteriorating, we do advise you speak to your specialist so that they can assess if they need to see you sooner. We do find that an initial response might well be ‘Get a letter from your GP’, however we are finding that we are merely reporting exactly what you have told us, and it seems more sensible for patient and consultant to have a direct conversation.
Why can we not assist with this?
We do not have any special hotline number to the hospital, we do not have access to the hospital appointment booking system and we are not notified in advance of any hospital appointments or operation dates you might have. Therefore, if you need this information, we urge you to contact the hospital directly.
Due to changes in the hospital contracts that came about in 2017, hospitals are now obliged to respond to any queries you might have about your care, in very much the same was we as GP’s respond to patients with queries about the care that we provide. Accordingly, hospital matters should not fall to your GP to resolve.
Open Appointments
If you have an open appointment from the hospital, this usually lasts for 6 months from the date of your last outpatient appointment, unless otherwise specified.
If you wish to take up the offer of a further appointment with the hospital, you can do so directly with the consultant’s secretary – you do not have to go via your GP.
Simply ring them up and ask for another appointment to be sent out to you.
Should you continue to have difficulty in accessing your consultant, we advise that you contact the PALS department of the hospital for advice and assistance:
- Contact Patient Relations: Blackpool Teaching Hospitals
- Lancashire Teaching Hospital | Patient Experience and PALS (lancsteachinghospitals.nhs.uk)
*Official figures published in January 2022 show that a total of 6 million people were waiting to start hospital treatment in England, this is the highest number since records began.