A GP surgery has urged patients to stop "time wasting" after revealing more than 1,700 appointments have been missed in the past four months.

Park Surgery in Herne Bay says 4% of patients failed to turn up between April and July - the equivalent of more than 14 a day.

It estimated at least 288 hours have been "wasted" since April.

Practice manager Hannah Walker labelled the findings "frustrating".

She says: “I appreciate it can be difficult and people can forget, but it does prevent others from being seen.

“It is always frustrating to have missed appointments.

"We try to plan what we provide for every patient throughout the year, so if people don’t turn up, that gets impacted.

“Once an appointment is missed, we can’t get it back. We have finite resources.

"It’s like time wasting and if everybody did turn up we’d be able to run a more efficient service.”

Ms Walker admits doctors "usually like the odd one or two" bookings to be missed if they are running behind schedule, but says missed appointments have a greater impact on nurses and counsellors because they tend to see patients for longer.

Across the four months, there have been more than 43,000 bookings with the practice, which has surgeries in King’s Road and Broomfield Road.

May had the highest number of missed bookings, with 510 and at least 85 hours lost; while June had the lowest with 327 unattended.

In April, May and June, people aged 65 to 80 were most prone to missing their appointments.

"Older people seem to be more likely to genuinely forget about these things, rather than casually deciding not to turn up,” Ms Walker adds.

"We try to do text reminders for people and we are looking at introducing some phone reminders for those who don’t text.

"We’re encouraging as many patients as possible to register for online services."

Ms Walker urges patients to cancel their appointments if they realise they are unable to attend.

This can be done by calling the surgery, responding to its text message reminders or online.