University Hospitals Dorset is contacting thousands of patients in Bournemouth, Dorset, to confirm whether they still need their hospital appointments. The initiative began in February 2026, and residents who do not reply to multiple contact attempts risk being removed from the waiting list and discharged back to their GP under the trust’s waiting-list validation process.
The trust is using text messages, letters and phone calls to check lists for patients registered at Royal Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch hospitals. The work is intended to help staff prioritise people with the most urgent needs and to remove the names of people who no longer require treatment.
Many patients will receive a text message with a secure link to the trust’s patient portal (the DrDoctor patient portal used by UHD). If the trust does not have a mobile number for a patient, or if there is no reply to the digital contact, a letter will be sent in the post instead.
Staff are asking patients to make sure their contact details are up to date by speaking to reception teams during their next visit. Under the validation process, if a patient does not respond to multiple digital messages and follow-up correspondence, the trust may consider them no longer to need the appointment and take steps to discharge them back to primary care.
The push follows a December 2025 pilot of automated appointment cancellation and rescheduling via the patient portal. Regulators such as the Care Quality Commission have previously said a system-wide approach is needed to reduce waiting times at University Hospitals Dorset, reinforcing the trust’s efforts to improve outpatient management.
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