evidence: Hospitals using the tool are: saving up to £2m a year each by cutting missed appointments; are seeing the number of appointments where patients don’t turn up falling by almost a third and are cutting their postage costs by more than a quarter. [...] Almost eight million hospital appointments were missed, or ‘did not attend’, in 2017/18, according to the latest figures. That does not include appointments cancelled in advance by either the hospital or the patient. With each hospital outpatient appointment costing the NHS approximately £120, that could mean almost £1 billion worth of appointments were missed, equivalent to 257,000 hip replacements or 990,000 cataract operations.