Why dentistry is its own case
A physiotherapist books you for next Tuesday. A dentist books you for the second week of April. Six months is long enough for the patient to move house, change job, change phone number, and — most commonly — to have simply lost any memory of agreeing to it.
That produces a specific pattern: the recall appointment has by far the worst attendance on the schedule, and it also has the lowest per-appointment value, which is why practices under-invest in fixing it. The economics are misleading, because the recall is not really a check-up. It is the appointment where the work that pays for the practice gets found.
Attendance by appointment type, one practice
Twelve months, one four-surgery practice, their own numbers, shared for this page and rounded.
| Appointment type | Booked ahead | Attended | Missed | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Six-month recall | ~180 days | 612 | 138 | 18.4% |
| Hygienist | ~90 days | 421 | 51 | 10.8% |
| Treatment, first stage | ~14 days | 308 | 19 | 5.8% |
| Treatment, follow-up | ~10 days | 294 | 14 | 4.5% |
| Emergency and same-day | same day | 176 | 3 | 1.7% |
| All appointments | — | 1811 | 225 | 11.1% |
Source: One UK practice's own year of appointment data, shared for this page. A single practice, not a benchmark, and their definition counts any absence without 24 hours' notice.
The correlation is almost perfectly monotonic with booking horizon. That is the finding, and it points the fix at the recall rather than at the schedule as a whole.
A recall cadence that fits a six-month horizon
The standard three-touchpoint programme is designed for appointments booked days ahead. Recalls need one more contact and a different opening line.
- 1
Fourteen days out: re-establish that this exists
Name the month it was booked. "Your check-up with Dr Ferreira on 14 April — booked back in October."
The single most effective sentence available for recall appointments. Without it the message reads as an error, and a message that reads as an error gets ignored rather than questioned.
- 2
Seven days out: confirm the details are still true
Ask them to confirm, and take the opportunity to check the number and address still work.
Six months of drift means a meaningful share of your recall list has a dead phone number, and you find out on the day unless you check.
- 3
Twenty-four hours out: the ordinary reminder
The usual message, with the address and a one-tap confirmation.
Unremarkable and necessary. This is the only one most practices send, which is why their recall attendance sits where it does.
- 4
Two hours before: the last chance
Short, with a way to say no.
Recall slots are short, so filling one at two hours' notice is more plausible here than in most sectors — a hygienist slot can go to someone on a cancellation list who lives nearby.
Four touches for a recall and three for everything else. The difference is not enthusiasm; it is that six months of forgetting needs one more contact than two weeks of forgetting does.
Dental-specific details worth getting right
Six things that are specific to this setting rather than general reminder advice.
- Do not name the procedure in the message"Your appointment" rather than "your root canal". It appears on a lock screen in front of whoever else is in the room, and treating dental work as private costs you nothing.
- Send recall reminders to the whole family on the same dayFamilies book together and attend together. Four separate messages arriving across a fortnight produce four separate opportunities to reschedule one of them and break the block.
- Check the phone number at the seven-day touch, not on the daySix months of drift is the highest number-decay of any appointment type in general practice, and the fix costs one extra message.
- Give hygienist slots to the cancellation list firstThey are short, they are frequently the easiest to fill at notice, and filling one is the difference between the loss being real and being recovered.
- Treat a missed recall as a lapsed patient, not a missed slotThe follow-up that matters is not about the appointment; it is about whether that person comes back at all. Practices that send a recall no-show straight back into the recall list eighteen months later have lost them without noticing.
- Watch the interval, not just the dateA patient moved from April to June has not missed anything, and counting them as a no-show pollutes the number you are trying to manage.
Objections
- Our practice management software already sends recalls.
- Most do, and most send exactly one, fourteen or seven days out, from a no-reply address. If that describes yours, the gap is not the software — it is that three of the four touches above are missing and none of them can be replied to.
- Four messages for a check-up is excessive.
- It would be for an appointment booked next week. For one booked in October and happening in April, the fourteen-day message is not a reminder at all, it is an introduction, and the patient experiences it as a service rather than as nagging.
- We charge for missed appointments already.
- Then your rate is probably better than the table above and your recall attendance is probably still the worst line on your schedule, because a fee deters the ambivalent and does nothing at all about the forgotten.
- Our patients are older and do not use WhatsApp.
- Then send SMS, which is exactly the point of choosing a channel per patient rather than per practice. The channel argument is regional and generational, and a practice with a sixty-plus list in the UK should not be reading this site's WhatsApp enthusiasm as advice.
Tell me when this exists
In the context field: your recall attendance, if you know it separately from the rest.