THOUSANDS of missed appointments at Oxfordshire’s four main hospitals wasted £9.5m in a year.

Yesterday Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust revealed that between April 2014 and March this year patients missed 66,638 appointments, resulting in wasted millions that could have funded 380 nurses or bought 10 MRI scanners.

Doctors, nurses and clinical practitioners arranged nearly a million appointments in that 12 months but 6.8 per cent of patients didn’t turn up, costing approximately £142 per appointment.

And the figure was 14.9 per cent up on the preceeding 12 months, when the trust estimates it cost £8.2m.

OUHT, which runs Headington’s John Radcliffe Hospital, Churchill Hospital, Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre and the Horton General Hospital in Banbury, has now launched an “awareness campaign” on the “true cost of appointments” to the hospitals.

Jacquie Pearce-Gervis, chairwoman of activist group Patient Voice, said: “These figures are incredibly high. I’m disappointed that my fellow patients aren’t taking their appointments seriously and the problem seems to be getting worse.

“People who are in desperate need of these appointments are being forced to wait months when some people aren’t even turning up.”

Cowley resident Jane Slade uses the Headington hospitals about three times a year, and was treated at the JR in 2009 after an aortic aneurysm caused her to become a paraplegic.

The 58-year-old said: “That’s just a waste really isn’t it?

“People are not caring enough and not thinking about the effects that it has on other people.

“They’re just thinking of themselves.”

Dr Sarah Pendlebury, dementia consultant at the JR, said: “It is more understandable for some of the older patients at our clinic to miss appointments because maybe they are reliant on ambulance transport, or maybe they have forgotten.

“But for younger patients there are fewer reasons for people to miss appointments.

“The fact that it’s a free service may mean that people don’t think they need to cancel.

“They don’t realise the real cost of missing an appointment, and the drain on a hospital’s resources.”

But some have blamed the parking at OUHT hospitals for missed appointments.

Keith Strangwood, chairman of Banbury-based group Keep the Horton General, said: “I would not mind guessing a major part of them will be from the Banbury area as it’s hard to get to the JR. It can be up to three hours. Accessibility is an issue. We should have more services locally.”

In March, former Oxford Nuffield Professor of Surgery Sir Peter Morris called the parking at the JR “disgraceful chaos”.

Sir Peter openly admitted “giving up” and cancelling a meeting after being stuck in a queue for parking at the hospital for 45 minutes.

Outgoing chief executive of the trust Sir Jonathan Michael has said that the trust was petitioning Oxford City Council for more parking spaces to alleviate the pressure on the system.

But Headington community activist Mike Ratcliffe said: “What we want to see is the hospitals making better use of other modes of transport and deciding which major group, staff or patients, get to use the car parking.”

Some consultants at the trust have said that part of the reason for the increase in missed appointments is the “lack of communication” with clinics from the central hospital.

Churchill Hospital respiratory consultant Prof John Stradling said: “It’s certainly wasteful, but part of the problem is that there isn’t a central cancellation point for patients at the hospital.

“If a patient calls up the hospital to cancel, we may never hear about it at the clinic.

“My advice to patients who know they can’t make appointments is to cancel as soon as they know.”