The revelation that a total of 53,916 patients failed to turn up for hospital appointments in Bradford last year is staggering.

It represents a huge amount of time, and more importantly money, wasted in having to reorganise and re-arrange appointments, and in having staff wasting their time.

Even given the scale of the enterprise, with all the different clinics within the remit of the Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, it is still an absolutely incredible figure.

The cost to the health service and, therefore, to the taxpayer is frightening, particularly at a time when the Government is cutting NHS budgets and trying to encourage more efficiency savings.

Unfortunately, a huge amount of blame must be laid directly at the door of patients.

There will obviously be a number of legitimate cases where missing an appointment was unavoidable. But even if the figure for missed appointments was cut by half, it would save the Trust a huge amount of money.

It isn’t difficult to make a phone call if you know you are not going to be able to make an appointment. It will not only save money, but it could also allow someone on a waiting list to be given an earlier appointment.

We are all quick to criticise organisations like the health service when things go wrong.

But this is a case where everyone who uses it can help to save money and therefore improve the service Bradford receives.

It just takes a little bit of thought and consideration to make sure you notify them if you are forced to miss an appointment.

As the Trust says, it can’t treat an empty chair.