How do I work out my real no-show rate?
Count one thing rather than three. Most booking systems record did-not-attend, late cancellation and clinic-initiated changes in the same status field, and they cost a session, a phone call and nothing respectively. Separating them commonly halves the headline rate, and the smaller number is the one you can act on.
Section 01
Three events, one status field
Did not attend, cancelled late and we filled the slot, and we moved it ourselves are all written into the same column. Only the first cost you a session.
Separated, a headline of 22.4% becomes 11.4% in one worked example. That is not a cosmetic improvement: it changes whether the problem is worth an intervention at all.
Section 02
Booking lead time is usually the answer
How far ahead an appointment was made is typically the strongest predictor in the file, and it is the field most exports bury or omit.
Where it exists, the pattern is usually monotonic across bands and holds within every clinician and appointment type, which is what distinguishes a real driver from a coincidence. If your export lacks the booking timestamp, it is worth going back to the system for it.
Appointments booked more than 60 days out were missed at 3.9 times the rate of those booked within a week.
Section 03
Utilisation needs the rota, not the bookings
Dividing attended sessions by booked sessions produces a figure that cannot fall below a hundred per cent except through no-shows, and therefore says nothing about capacity you failed to sell.
The denominator has to come from the rota, with blocked administrative time excluded and walk-ins kept out because they occupy a slot that was never offered.
Section 04
What the export needs to contain
One row per appointment with an outcome status, and the field that matters most: the date the appointment was booked, not only the date it was for. Most booking systems can add it and most default exports leave it out.
A rota or session template is what makes utilisation answerable at all; without one, attendance and demand patterns are still there.
See it on a real project
The 22.4% rate combined three different events; the unrecovered no-show rate was 11.4%.
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