Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (Royal Devon) is offering some patients the chance to cut down their waiting time and get an appointment at short notice through the MY CARE patient app and online service. 

It is just a fact of life that sometimes patients are unable to attend their appointment and have to cancel near the scheduled time. However, every missed appointment costs the Trust in time and money and wastes an appointment slot that another waiting patient could have used. 

To meet this challenge Royal Devon is using a new online appointment system where last-minute appointments will be made available to others who are already waiting for a booked appointment.

Patients waiting for their appointment will now get notified if an appointment slot nearer in time than the one they’re waiting for has become free. Appointments will only be offered that are like-for-like to the one already booked. 

The offer will be sent to multiple patients and once accepted it gets retracted from all other patients. By accepting the new appointment, the pre-existing appointment gets cancelled. There’s no obligation to take up an offer though, patients can simply reject or ignore the appointment offer.  

The Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) department started using the new system on Monday and managed to fill all five of their Fast Pass appointment offers within a matter of hours.  

Booking teams continue to ring patients who don't use MY CARE, so that the new system is fair to patients who prefer not to use online services or apps. 

The new appointment system uses the Trust’s MY CARE service, a digital portal that allows patients to see their upcoming appointments and other hospital information. Almost one in every three Royal Devon patients already use MY CARE. To sign up simply speak to your care team or visit the Trust website here. 

MY CARE uses the Epic electronic patient record system that the Trust began using in 2020. 

“Since starting to use an electronic patient record we are constantly looking at how we can use it to improve our services to patients, and work in a more sustainable way. While this is very early days for our patient self-scheduling capabilities, these first 24 hours with ENT demonstrate the potential and we a hope to see it implemented in more areas in the future.” says Emma Newton, Clinical Administration Transformation Lead.