BRADFORD Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust outpatients can now change or cancel their appointments online or by text message.
The Trust, which runs Bradford Royal Infirmary, St Luke’s Hospital and community sites, has partnered with DrDoctor to provide the new service, following a successful switch last year to digital appointment letters, which can be accessed on a mobile phone or digital device.
Outpatients automatically receive a paper letter through the post if they do not open a digital letter sent to their mobile phone or email address within three days.
Andrew Mullan, the Trust’s Service Improvement Lead, said: “The new service will now give patients the option to change or cancel their appointment at any time of the day via our online patient portal or by text message, without needing to call our Central Patient Booking Service.
Text message
“Patients have already been receiving text messages confirming their appointment with us but, now, they can also reply to the text message to request another appointment or let us know they no longer need treatment.
“Our Central Patient Booking Servce is exceptionally busy and currently receives more than 12,000 calls every month.
“However, with 66% of Trust patients now choosing to view their letters online, the option to change or cancel their appointment at any time online or by text is likely to appeal. The new text service will also free-up our CPBS phone lines for people who need to call us.”
Thanks to the new service, appointment reminder text messages will also appear in the same text message trail as the original digital letter invite.
However, a traditional paper letter will always be printed and sent automatically if:
- A patient replies PRINT to the text message
- A patient does not view their digital letter online within three days
- The appointment is less than six days away. In this case the new service will print and post an invite letter first class, and send a digital invite on the same day.
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For further media information, please contact communications@bthft.nhs.uk
Note to Editors:
- Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust:
Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is responsible for providing hospital services for the people of Bradford and communities across Yorkshire. We serve a core population of around 500,000 and provide specialist services for 1.1 million people.
Our 5,500 staff work over several sites, including Bradford Royal Infirmary, which provides the majority of inpatient services, and St Luke’s Hospital, which predominantly provides outpatient and rehabilitation services. We also manage local community hospitals at Westwood Park, Westbourne Green, and Eccleshill.
In early 2017, a new £28 million wing opened at Bradford Royal Infirmary, part of a £75m investment to improve patient care across our hospitals over a five-year period. It provides world-class facilities for elderly care, children’s services, a state-of-the-art intensive care unit with increased single-room provision and a retail concourse.
The new wing is a continuation of our work to improve patient experience after our new £2 million neonatal unit officially opened in January 2015. Our maternity services were recently shortlisted for the Royal College of Midwives’ (RCM) Midwifery Service of the Year Award, recognising excellence and innovation in the provision of maternity care.
In 2017, we also completed a £2m refurbishment of our Emergency Department (ED) as part of an ambitious vision to create a more efficient acute medicine service for the people of Bradford. It has been designed to provide a slicker and more efficient service, with faster senior clinical involvement at an early stage in the patient pathway.
As a teaching hospital, we are at the forefront of education and development in healthcare, and have an excellent reputation for research performance. We are one of the leading centres in conducting applied research in the country, particularly in quality and safety, elderly care and rehabilitation.
The Trust is home to the Bradford Institute for Health Research (BIHR) where researchers have led the development, validation and implementation of the award-winning Bradford Electronic Frailty Index (eFI) which helps calculate an elderly person’s risk of disability, impairment, falls and complications of chronic diseases, as well as their diminishing independence and capability. This is now being used by 98% of all GPs across the country.
Our award-winning Ophthalmology department is home to numerous worldwide clinical trials taking the lead in eye care research and we are one of only three sites in the United Kingdom to be enlisted in the Perioperative Enhanced Recovery Hip Fracture Care of Patients with Dementia (PERFECTED) study, which will investigate how the NHS can introduce better standards of care to improve outcomes for people with dementia.
The Trust has its own Bradford Hospitals Charity: https://bradfordhospitalscharity.org/
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For more information please visit www.bradfordhospitals.nhs.uk