People missing appointments for bone density and other medical tests at Nova Scotia's largest hospital are making waiting times even longer, a new Capital District Health report shows.
The Operational Measures Indicators Report for January 2008 shows missed appointments are common and create significant delays.
For example, the waiting time for a bone density test in the Capital Health area increased by 168 per cent from November 2005 to November 2007. Patients missed up to 14 per cent of the tests on a monthly basis, the report found.
Missed appointments for bone density scans and mammograms are a waste of valuable time, Jim Clark, director of diagnostic imaging at Capital Health, told CBC Friday.
"This is an area where when we get no-shows, we are losing productive time and sitting down and waiting for patients and trying to fill them in. So the more we can reduce that no-show rate in that area the better it is for everybody," he said.
"There's a low percentage of in-patients and a low percentage of emergency type of patients, so when an out-patient is a no-show, it's difficult to fill in around them."
There is only one bone-density unit in Capital Health, located at the Victoria General Hospital site. But two more machines are on order, one for the IWK Health Centre and one for Dartmouth General Hospital, the report said. In the meantime, operational hours may be extended to 12 or 16 hours at the VG site.
The report shows that getting an MRI can mean waiting for up to six months. But the percentage of missed appointments for MRIs has increased to seven per cent from three per cent over the past two years, the report states.
"The associated wait time for an elective MRI scan is 203 calendar days as of November 2007, while six per cent of the booked appointments for that month were missed," it said.
But Clarke said an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, machine is always busy, despite no-shows, because there are other in-patients or emergency patients who can fill the time slots.
Some people miss appointments because they've had to wait so long they've forgotten about them, Clarke said. But other folks don't come to appointments, he said, because they're afraid of test results.
"We've run into something like a fear factor, as well, where they fear sometimes the results they may get from the tests. So they have a tendency to use any excuse at all to try to put it off," Clarke said.
People need to remember that missed appointments are usually rescheduled, he said, and that just makes the waits even longer. | 
