Setting up text reminder services
A number of healthcare organisations now use an efficient text reminder service for outpatient appointments. By including DESMOND attendance with these, the importance of attending DESMOND groups will be raised in line with other healthcare appointments and, like the healthcare text, could include a monetary value of missed attendance.
It is hard to be specific about the exact steps that would need to be carried out to set this up, as every organisation will have a different process and may not necessarily have this kind of service readily available.
However, most organisations now have a text appointment reminder service and it is about finding out how to access this. A good starting point is to speak with your organisation’s IT department to see if they have the ability to help set this up for you. If one is not available, a possible solution could be to look at ‘Digital Marketplace’: a site designed to help public sector organisations find preferred suppliers of digital solutions.
Good working practice would be to have a variety of text reminders; these are some suggestions of time points for the reminders:
On booking
Up to 7 days before the appointment
48-72 hours before attending
These time points are supported by the findings seen in this publication by Haynes et al. (2013) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/pam.21717 and McLean et al. (2016)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4831598/pdf/ppa-10-479.pdf
These publications showed that including the cost of the missed appointment in the text reminder reduced DNA rates to 8.4%, so this is definitely something to consider including.