Failed-to-attend cost calculator for dental practices: what empty chair time costs a year, what reminders recover, and what you may lawfully charge

Owners describe the job as reducing FTAs and white space in the diary, and the searches agree: "dental cancellation policy template" is one of the most-typed templates in the sector. Before the policy, the number. This calculator puts a yearly figure on missed appointments for a mixed NHS and private practice and shows which lever applies to which half.

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Failed-to-attend cost calculator: what empty chair time costs a year, what reminders recover, and what you may lawfully charge

Appointments a week Failed-to-attend rate (%)Did not arrive and did not cancel in time Share of appointments that are NHS (%) Average private appointment fee (£) Value of a typical NHS appointment to the practice (£)Your UDA value times the UDAs a typical appointment earns Share of FTA slots you fill from the short-notice list (%) Private deposit you are considering (£)

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How it counts

Appointments a week times the FTA rate gives the missed slots; the share you re-fill from the short-notice list comes off; the rest is multiplied by the value of a slot, which blends your private fee and the value of a typical NHS appointment to the practice by your NHS mix. Times 52. The figure is chair time at the practice's own rates, not profit, and it ignores the knock-on cost of the patient's treatment slipping.

The two halves

NHS. No charge to the patient is possible for a missed NHS appointment; the ability to charge was removed in the April 2006 contract, and the BDA's example practice, with about one in seven NHS patients failing to attend, puts the cost at about £56,000 a year. The levers are the reminder sequence, how quickly a freed slot is offered to the short-notice list, and the practice's own policy on how many unexplained misses it accepts before it stops offering routine appointments, which must be applied consistently and explained in writing.

Private. A deposit or a cancellation charge is lawful on three conditions: it is disclosed before the appointment is booked, in terms the patient agrees to; it reflects a genuine estimate of what the missed slot costs the practice, not a round number chosen to deter; and it is not charged when the slot is filled. A charge above the fee for the appointment is a penalty and will not survive a card dispute or a Dental Complaints Service look. The calculator flags that and the cancellation policy template writes the wording.

What the reminders are worth

Software of Excellence's utilisation data put the average FTA rate at 4.3%. An email at 20 days, an email at 7 days and a text at 2 days took it to 2.5%; adding an automated reply-to-confirm on the text took it to 1.2%. The calculator scales those ratios to your rate. The data is one vendor's and from 2015, which we say because it is the only measured sequence we found; the direction is not in doubt and the cost is texts at 4p to 12p each, about 40p an appointment across a sequence.

The short-notice list

Every missed slot that is re-filled recovers its full value. A list of patients who want to be seen sooner, texted the moment a slot frees, is the cheapest lever in the practice and the one most often run from memory rather than a list. Raising the re-fill share by twenty points is shown on the calculator in pounds.

Reading your own rate

Most practice management systems report FTAs as a count; divide by the appointments booked in the same period, not the appointments kept, and use at least three months so a bad week does not set the policy. Separate NHS from private if the system can, because the rates usually differ and the levers do. A practice that measures 4.3% and sets the calculator to it has a baseline; one that guesses "about one in twenty" does not, and will not know whether the reminder sequence worked.

Where this goes next

The recall planner produces the reminder dates for every recall from the interval the clinician sets; the FTA number here is what those dates are for. An AI Recall Coordinator set up by Overlyft runs the sequence, the short-notice list and the overdue list from the practice management system, and reports the FTA rate each month against this calculator's baseline. Regulated work: the practice manager reviews the policy wording and a GDC registrant decides anything that touches a patient's care. Not legal or financial advice.