"They failed to cancel my appointment"

My husband had an appointment at the urology clinic at Ayr hospital, the appoint letter came around the 25th of September with the appointment date of middle of October. The letters are sent out from Crosshouse Hospital although the appointment was at Ayr and it was Ayr hospital.

As we were going to be on holiday on that date we phoned the hospital immediately to cancel the appointment and to have a new date sent to us. The person who took the call stressed how lucky we were to have such an early appointment and seemed to make a big issue of the fact that we were asking for a new date. However I let that ride.

Today I called the hospital to find out if a new appointment had been sent in case we had failed to receive the letter. I was told that because we had failed to attend the appointment we would need to be referred again and the whole process would start from scratch.

It was not a case of ‘failing to attend’, we actually cancelled the appointment, in my view this was in good time – 10 working days before the appointment. When you have taken this action in good faith you do not then expect to be told that you have to start the process all over again. Hospital appointments are important and one with the urology department is not one that we would dismiss lightly, this is very frustrating