Attendance Policy

At Birmingham Physiotherapy we aim to provide all our 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 therefore ask that appointments are attended promptly. Aiming to arrive at least 5-10 minutes before the allotted appointment time is recommended. This policy helps us to deliver private physiotherapy services appropriately.

This policy is in place to ensure a fair, consistent, and transparent process is followed when a patient attends an appointment late, misses an appointment or cancels at short notice without providing 24 hours prior notice.

When a patient arrives less than 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.

A patient that arrives more than 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.

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.

We appreciate the effort our patients make to attend on time and therefore do our best to run as close to appointment times as possible. Adhering to an Attendance Policy assists us in doing so. However, due to patient demand, unavoidable delays happen. When the clinician is running late our reception team will advise patients upon arrival and apologise for the delay.

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 hour’s 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.

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